​Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Basel!

​​Join us for the Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in Basel! Our event is hosted in Basel co-hosted by Roche, AWS 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.

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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
5:30 pm – 1st set of short talks

​🎙️ Yannick Misteli (Roche) - Iceberg in the Enterprise: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

​​​🎙️ Viktor Kessler (Vakamo) - Safe Data Changes in the Lakehouse: WAP, Branching, and Tags in Apache Iceberg

​ 6:30 pm – 7:00 pm Networking break

​🎙️ Pinaki Banerjee & Werner Gunter (AWS) - Building an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse on AWS: Best Practices, Patterns & Compute Interoperability

​7:30 pm – More Networking
8:00 pm – Networking goes to ...

​How to Get to the Venue

​Address:

​Grenzacherstrasse 183, 4058 Basel

​Building Access

​https://maps.app.goo.gl/mfBfCKdfCsovVKgC9

​🪪 ID Requirements

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​Presentations & Speakers

​​​​​​​​​🌟 Iceberg in the Enterprise: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

​Apache Iceberg is revolutionizing data architecture, but scaling it in an enterprise environment comes with severe growing pains. In this 20-minute talk, we’ll explore the "Good, Bad, and Ugly" of Iceberg in production. We’ll cover the massive benefits of interoperability, the painful reality of maintenance overhead and catalog fragmentation, and finally, a deep dive into the ugliest part of the Lakehouse: managing robust, cross-engine access control. If your goal is to truly converge BI and AI workloads, these are the hard architectural truths you need to solve first.

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​Dr. Yannick Misteli Head of Engineering, Pharma Commercial | Roche

​Dr. Yannick Misteli is an engineering executive, AWS Product Advisory Council Member, and the Head of Engineering for Pharma Commercial at Roche. With a PhD in Quantum Physics and deep expertise in distributed cloud architectures, he leads a global organization of 150+ engineers in building the enterprise data meshes and MLOps pipelines required to scale GenAI across 80+ countries. Operating at the intersection of high-performance computing and enterprise strategy, Yannick is dedicated to building the resilient data foundations that drive modern AI.

​​​​​​​​​🌟 Safe Data Changes in the Lakehouse: WAP, Branching, and Tags in Apache Iceberg

​​Modern data platforms increasingly behave like software systems — but most organizations still lack safe workflows for changing data. Updating a table in production can easily break downstream pipelines, dashboards, or machine learning models.

​​In this session, we explore how Write-Audit-Publish (WAP) and Iceberg’s branching and tagging capabilities introduce Git-like workflows to the data lakehouse. Instead of writing directly to production tables, teams can validate changes, test transformations, and audit results before publishing them.

​​We’ll walk through the core concepts behind WAP, branches, and tags in Apache Iceberg, and explain how they enable safer experimentation, reproducibility, and controlled data releases.

​​To make this concrete, the session includes a live demo showing how to:

• ​​write data to a staging branch

• ​​validate and audit changes

• ​​publish the result to production

• ​​use tags to create reproducible data snapshots

​​If you’re interested in bringing software engineering best practices to data management, this session will show how Iceberg makes it possible.

​​​Viktor Kessler, is Co-Founder 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.

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​​​​​​​​​🌟 Building an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse on AWS: Best Practices, Patterns & Compute Interoperability

​Apache Iceberg has rapidly become the open table format of choice for modern lakehouse architecture — and for good reason. Customers across industries are adopting Iceberg to bring warehouse-grade capabilities to open storage: ACID transactions, time travel, schema evolution, and partition evolution — without vendor lock-in. AWS services are focusing all the best practices to enable Iceberg based lakehouse implementation to empower enterprises to build their “One Table, Many Consumption Engines” approach by compute interoperability. Several AWS services together are sharing an integrated stack to achieve a cohesive Iceberg ecosystem.
In this lightning talk, we'll share practical guidance for building and operating an Iceberg-based lakehouse on AWS.

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Why Iceberg and Why Now?
Best Practices & Common Patterns to follow Iceberg enabled Lakehouse
Live Demo: Parquet to Iceberg with AWS Services
AWS Compute engines interoperability with Apache Iceberg

Speaker:

​Werner Gunter - Principal CSE, Analytics, AWS, EMEA

​Pinaki Banerjee - Senior Solutions Architect, Healthcare and Life Sciences, AWS, EMEA​