The inaugural issue of Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD) appeared in 1993. It was an outcome of this journal’s founding editor Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid’s vision. In the first editorial, he noted the need to provide a high quality forum to “publish original results related to databases and systems that use distributed or highly parallel platforms, parallel algorithms, issues resulting from parallelism and distribution of application and data.” DAPD indeed started at the right time, and its relevance grew as database technologies were increasingly deployed in large-scale distributed infrastructures and used parallelism and distribution to improve scale and performance. DAPD faithfully served this mission and made a space among database journals with its focus. Ahmed was early in identifying the topics that grew in importance, such as interoperability in multidatabase systems, object-oriented databases, knowledge bases, and managing biological, spatial, scientific and statistical data.