Open Lakehouse + AI Contributors Summit 2026

​Overview

​The Databricks Developer Relations team is hosting an invite-only, one-day mini-summit for open source contributors and maintainers. This event will foster high-density discussions on the latest innovations and advancements across projects like Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg™, Apache Hudi, Trino, MLflow, Unity Catalog, Datafusion, Apache Spark™, Apache Arrow and more. The goal is to align the Open Lakehouse ecosystem by bringing together contributors from across all of these projects.

​What can you expect:

• ​A lively, peer-to-peer discussion among project leads and core contributor and maintainers

• ​Collaborative efforts to address technical friction and work toward interoperability among open source projects with Open Lakehouse

• ​Roadmaps and future directions across open source projects 

​Check out the FAQ and project list to learn how we handle sessions and collaboration.

​It’s a unique opportunity to connect with key contributors and project maintainers to help drive the open source ecosystem forward, align on the evolution of Open Lakehouse paradigm, and ensure our shared foundations are ready for the next wave of intelligent workloads.

​Agenda

​The mini summit will consist of four tracks with three 50-minute sessions. Below is the work-in-progress proposed schedule.

​11:00am  Lunch & Registration (Mingling)

​11:45am Welcome Remarks

​12:00pm Parallel Breakouts #1

• ​Spark Declarative APIs

  • ​Track: Streaming and Declarative Pipelines

• ​Delta Kernel

  • ​Track: Open Lakehouse Formats

• ​DataFusion Roadmap

  • ​Track: Query Engines & Governance (Foothill F)

• ​Multimodal Formats in the Age of AI

  • ​Track: Data + AI Format Evolution (Soma)

​1:00pm Parallel Breakouts #2

• ​Spark Accelerators

  • ​Track: Streaming and Declarative Pipelines

• ​Iceberg v4

  • ​Track: Open Lakehouse Formats

• ​Arrow Roadmap

  • ​Query Engines & Governance (Foothill F)

• ​Parquet formats for ML/AI use cases

  • ​Track: Data + AI Format Evolution (Soma)

​2:00pm Parallel Breakouts #3

• ​Streaming: RTM, Flink

  • ​Track: Streaming and Declarative Pipelines

• ​Iceberg Governance (REST API)

  • ​Track: Open Lakehouse Formats

• ​Future of Catalogs 

  • ​Query Engines & Governance (Foothill F)

• ​Addressing AI Code Slop

  • ​Track: Data + AI Format Evolution (Soma)

​3:00pm Summit Ends