Breaking the Ice: Building the Future of Data Infra with Apache Iceberg
This event is a part of the Streaming Lakehouse Tour.
👥 Who’s invited?
If you're all about real-time data or AI (or both!), this one’s for you. Bonus points if you’re an Iceberg fan—or just excited to meet fellow data and AI enthusiasts.
📅 Event Program
5:30–6:00 PM – Doors Open & Welcome
6:00–6:30 PM – Mingling & Networking
6:30–7:30 PM – Tech Talks + Q&A
7:30–8:30 PM – More Networking
🎤 Talks
Yingjun Wu - Building a Real-Time Lakehouse on Iceberg (Without Losing Your Mind)
Georg Kreuzmayr - Future is Fast, Open, and Deployable Anywhere: When Fire(bolt) meets Ice(berg)
📗 Abstracts
Yingjun Wu, Founder and CEO at RisingWave Labs: Building a Real-Time Lakehouse on Iceberg (Without Losing Your Mind)
Everyone makes streaming sound simple - until you try bolting it onto your batch pipeline and it blows up. This talk skips the marketing gloss and gets into the real work: how to make batch and streaming actually play nice. I’ll walk through the essentials, then get into the messy parts - compaction, primary key updates, exactly-once delivery, and keeping your compute bill from spiraling. You’ll learn how to plug RisingWave into your existing stack and get real-time results without rewriting everything. It’s based on what we’ve seen in production - real problems, real fixes, no buzzwords.
Georg Kreuzmayr, Software Engineer at Firebolt: The Future is Fast, Open, and Deployable Anywhere: When Fire(bolt) meets Ice(berg)
Analytics and AI-driven applications demand both scalable and low-latency data access. However, data infrastructure capable of meeting these requirements often suffers from prohibitive costs or complexity. Moreover, industry best practice dictates that companies should avoid vendor lock-in by adopting open table formats like Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake.
Firebolt aims to address this challenge with Firebolt Core: a free, self-hosted version of our data warehouse, distributed as a lightweight Docker image. Deployable anywhere – from a single laptop to enterprise data centers – it is forever free to use.
In this talk we take a look under the hood of Firebolt Core and dive into the challenges we had to solve to bring a free-to-use production-grade data warehouse to the market. Furthermore, you will learn about our efforts to support high-performance, low-latency analytics on the lakehouse architecture.