Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - September 2025 Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in London!
Join us for the very first Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in London! Our event is hosted in Paddington Central, London, co-hosted by Microsoft, EnterpriseDB and Vakamo.
🎟️ When registering, please select one of the two ticket types:
In-Person Ticket: Join us on-site! Your name will be used to pre-register for venue access.
Remote-Only Ticket: Can’t make it in person? No worries—register to join the live stream, receive event recordings, and stay connected with the community.
Also make sure to join Apache Iceberg Slack Channel to stay up-to-date with future meetups in Europe!
Agenda
5:00 pm – Registration & Networking
6:00 pm – 1st set of short talks
- 🌟 Christian Thiel (Vakamo): Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
- 🌟 Tom Scott (Streambased.io): Buffer, Blast, or Balance: Three Ways to Stream to Iceberg
- 🌟 Srimanth Rudraraju (LSEG ) LSEG’s Open Data Strategy with Apache Iceberg and Microsoft OneLake
7:20 pm – Networking break
7:40 pm – 2nd set of short talks
- 🌟 Miles Richardson (EDB ): Bringing Postgres to the Lakehouse
- 🌟 Tom Ebergen (DuckDB Labs): Iceberg Support in DuckDB
8:15 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
How to Get to the Venue
Address: Storey Club, 4 Kingdom St, London W2 6BD
https://maps.app.goo.gl/JDFogVt3GfN28k6SA
Livestream
We are setting up a Livestream for the talks using Zoom. The stream starts at around 18:00 and is available here: TBA
Talks will also be uploaded to YouTube after the event.
Presentations & Speakers
🌟 Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
The Iceberg REST Catalog is quickly becoming the go-to way of connecting different engines and platforms to Apache Iceberg tables. But what does it actually solve, and where is the community taking it next? In this session, we’ll start with a quick intro to the REST Catalog and why it’s needed, before diving into hot topics like security, authentication, and fine-grained access control. We’ll also explore the latest developments in the community — including the new Events Endpoint — and talk about what’s coming down the road. If you’re curious about how Iceberg REST is shaping the future of open lakehouses, this is your chance to get up to speed and join the discussion.
Christian Thiel is cofounder of Vakamo and the creator of Lakekeeper, an Apache Licensed Iceberg REST Catalog. He’s a big believer in open standards like Apache Iceberg, which he sees as the backbone of today’s modern, composable Data & Analytics systems.
🌟 Buffer, Blast, or Balance: Three Ways to Stream to Iceberg
Streaming real-time data into Apache Iceberg has become a common pattern in modern data infrastructure. However, balancing low-latency delivery, storage efficiency, and operational simplicity remains a significant challenge for data engineering teams.
In this talk, we’ll explore three architectural patterns for solving the real-time ingestion problem:
* Accumulate-Then-Write (Storage-Efficient Path):
This approach buffers real-time events until they reach a target batch size, ensuring optimal file sizing and minimal metadata overhead in Iceberg.
* Write-Then-Compact (Low-Latency Path):
Data is written immediately to Iceberg to meet latency SLAs, with storage inefficiencies addressed later through asynchronous compaction jobs.
* Lambda 2.0 (Balanced Path):
A novel hybrid technique that splits Iceberg tables into a logical hot tier and a physical cold tier. This allows teams to optimize simultaneously for low-latency access and long-term storage efficiency.
We'll deep dive into how Iceberg organizes files internally, discuss the role of streaming systems as emergent storage layers, and examine how unconventional access patterns, leveraging the data already flowing through your streams, can reshape real-time analytics.
Tom Scott: I'm a first-time founder and long-time data enthusiast, sharing deep dives, best practices, and war stories from building Streambased: a platform that indexes Kafka for fast, consistent, and cost-effective real-time analytics. With nearly 7 years at Confluent contributing to the Apache Kafka ecosystem, I live and breathe stream processing, and I’m here to help data professionals unlock the full power of real-time systems.
🌟 LSEG’s Open Data Strategy with Apache Iceberg and Microsoft OneLake
In this talk Srimanth Rudraraju will present us:
LSEG manages petabytes of financial data that support global markets. Traditional data lake architectures have led to challenges like complex ETL pipelines, duplicated storage, and fragmented access across platforms. By adopting Apache Iceberg on Microsoft OneLake, we are creating a unified and open data layer that simplifies governance, reduces data movement, and enables direct access from tools such as Fabric, Snowflake, and Databricks. This shift supports our move toward scalable, real-time financial intelligence while maintaining flexibility across our data ecosystem.
🌟 Bringing Postgres to the Lakehouse
In this talk, we'll introduce and demonstrate Postgres Analytics Accelerator (PGAA), an extension for reading and writing Iceberg (and Delta...) tables. We'll cover the technical details, including why we moved our focus from Delta to Iceberg, how we embedded DataFusion as a query engine into Postgres, and why we're now adding a Spark engine now, too... But we'll also discuss customer requirements, what we're hearing from enterprise data teams, and how Iceberg allows us to "meet customers where they are," with an interoperable, incrementally adoptable path to modernization.
Miles Richardson is a Principal Product Manager at EnterpriseDB (EDB), the leading Postgres Data & AI company with over 20 years of experience delivering enterprise-grade Postgres solutions. Miles joined EDB in 2023 through the acquisition of Splitgraph, the company he co-founded to bring analytics to Postgres, a vision he continues to pursue at EDB. As part of the Analytics team at EDB, Miles is focused on “bringing Postgres to the Lakehouse," and helping organizations modernize their enterprise data stack around Open Standards and Open Source.
🌟 Making Iceberg Easy: Iceberg Support in DuckDB
In this talk, I will introduce the DuckDB-Iceberg extension and show how it eliminates common points of friction when loading catalogs and importing data, making it significantly easier to get started with Iceberg. I will walk through the key challenges faced when building a native Iceberg reader and writer for DuckDB, and how the DuckDB Labs team approached and solved them. Then, I will demo how simple it is to import CSV data into Iceberg using DuckDB and immediately query it, no setup overhead, no extra tooling. Finally, I plan to showcase DuckDB-Iceberg running in WASM, highlighting just how portable and powerful this integration can be.
Tom Ebergen is Software Engineer at DuckDB Labs
Notes
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