Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - Nov 2025 Vilnius Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Vilnius!
Join us for the very first Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in Vilnius! Our event is co-hosted by Google, Confluent 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.
Livestream
https://stream.meet.google.com/stream/f6f75186-1daf-495e-a043-81c56512974d
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 – Meetup starts
🎙️ Viktor Kessler, Vakamo - Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
🎙️ Martynas Cibulskis, Vinted: (Ab)using the Iceberg FileIO
🎙️ Kęstutis Daugėla, Google Cloud: Iceberg Hits BigQuery: Placing Open Source at the Heart of the Warehouse
7:20 - 7:40 pm – Networking break
🎙️ Anton Borisov, Fresha - Iceberg CDC: Stream a Little Dream of Me
🎙️ Olena Kutsenko, Confluent - Teaching data lakes to speak human with Apache Iceberg, LLMs and MCP
8:15 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
How to Get to the Venue
Address:
Tech Park, Antakalnio st. 17, Vilnius, #3 building
Building Access
https://share.google/NMSCskMr8DYr8TXIL
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.
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.
🌟 (Ab)using the Iceberg FileIO
In this talk we will introduce the FileIO abstraction exposed by the Java Iceberg library and explain how it can be (ab)used to achieve goals like improving caching and implementing replication and backups for Iceberg tables.
Martynas Cibulskis is a Data Engineer at Vinted on the Data Platform Foundations team. He maintains the infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud platform storing and processing data at a petabyte scale, with a current focus on data storage and ingestion into Apache Iceberg. His career has spanned building analytics pipelines in pure-cloud, on-prem, and now the massive-scale hybrid environment at Vinted.
🌟 Iceberg Hits BigQuery: Placing Open Source at the Heart of the Warehouse
Apache Iceberg brings reliable open tables to your data lake; Google BigQuery brings elite analytics speed. For years, marrying the two meant accepting a difficult compromise: high-latency query federation or costly, brittle ETL pipelines that duplicated data into proprietary storage.
This session dives into the two architectural patterns now available to solve this. We will contrast the BigQuery-centric approach, using fully-managed tables modifiable directly in BigQuery, against the Spark-centric approach, where customer-managed tables offer true interoperability.
Kęstutis Daugėla is a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud and a PhD student who specializes in mastering the complexities of large-scale data systems. He applies his expertise in data architecture, data governance and AI to engineer powerful, elegant solutions, empowering organizations to overcome their most demanding data challenges.
🌟 Iceberg CDC: Stream a Little Dream of Me
Iceberg was built for steady tempos with immutable files and clean snapshots, but streaming plays a restless beat.
This talk dives into how Iceberg V3 and V4 retune its metadata for real-time CDC. V3 brought deletion vectors and row lineage. V4 plans to add a Root Manifest and manifest-level delete vectors that make “what changed since X” a byte-range diff, not a directory crawl.
We’ll explore how these shifts make streaming upserts cheaper to plan, faster to read and finally in rhythm to make Iceberg flow.
Anton Borisov is a Principal Data Architect who builds real-time data platforms at the edge of what's possible with Flink, Kafka, and emerging open-source technologies. At Fresha, he has led mission-critical projects ranging from zero-downtime Postgres migrations to streaming architectures powering real-time customer analytics. A recognized voice in the data streaming community, Anton writes deep technical explorations that influence how engineers approach Flink, Iceberg, Paimon and StarRocks, bridging research, open-source innovation, and production reality.
🌟 Teaching data lakes to speak human with Apache Iceberg, LLMs and MCP
Imagine asking your data lake a question in plain English and getting the right answer instantly. With Natural Language to SQL, powered by large language models, that’s now possible. In this talk, we’ll show how LLMs turn questions into queries, tackle complex schemas, and use tools like the Model Context Protocol to deliver accurate results by querying data managed through Apache Iceberg. You’ll learn how natural language is reshaping data access and how to start using it in your own stack today.
Olena Kutsenko is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption.
She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers. As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise.
Notes
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