Welcome to the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2008) which was held in New Delhi, India. DASFAA 2008 continued the tradition of providing an inter- tional forum for technical discussion among researchers, developers and users of database systems from academia, business and industry. Organizing DASFAA 2008 was a very rewarding experience; it gave us an excellent opportunity to work with many ?ne colleagues both within and outside India. We would like to thank Jayant Haritsa and Ramamohanarao Kotagiri for putting together a world-classProgramCommittee. The committee workedvery hardto bring a high-qualitytechnical programto the conference.DASFAA 2008 also included an industrial track co-chaired by Anand Deshpande and Takeshi Fukuda. The conference also featured three tutorials: (1) Preference Query For- lation and Processing: Ranking and Skyline Query Approaches, by Seung-Won Huang and Wolf-Tilo Balke, (2) Stream Processing: Going Beyond Database Management Systems, by Sharma Chakravarthy, and (3) The Semantic Web: Semantics for Data and Services on the Web, by Vipul Kashyap and Christoph Bussler.We would like to thank S. Sudarshan and Kian-lee Tan for their e?ort in organizing the tutorials, Srinath Srinivasa and Wookey Lee for the panels, Prasan Roy and Anthony Tung for the demos, and Sanjay Chawla and Chee- Yong Chan for the workshops.