Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - Oct 2025 Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in London!
Join us for the Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in London! Our event is hosted in ... co-hosted by Snowflake, 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.
CFP is open until Oct 5th https://forms.gle/LAhTZVwFRW1FKwwy6
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
Talk 1: Viktor Kessler, Vakamo - Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
Talk 2: Anton Borisov, Fresha - Breaking the Ice with StarRocks
Talk 3: Dimitar Nedev, Booking.com, and Dan Hunt Snowflake - Diving Deep into Booking.com's Iceberg Data Lake
7:20 pm – Networking break
7:40 pm – 2nd set of short talks
Talk 1: Olena Kutsenko, Confluent - Teaching data lakes to speak human with Apache Iceberg, LLMs and MCP
Talk 2: Thanh Tung Dao - gophers on iceberg table maintenance and heading towards v3 specs
8:15 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
Livestream
TBA
How to Get to the Venue
Address:
One Crown Place - 19 Sun St, London EC2A 2FJ, UK
Check-in:
We’ll complete a pre-check with you via email.
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.
🌟 Breaking the Ice with StarRocks
Apache Iceberg brings reliable tables to the lake; StarRocks makes them fast to query. This talk opens the hood on how StarRocks reads Iceberg tables through its external catalog while keeping the vectorized C++ execution engine in play, so scans, filters, joins, and aggregations run on columnar batches, not rows.
We’ll cover merge-on-read delete handling (position/equality deletes applied at scan time), snapshot-aware planning, and metadata/manifest caching that trims object-store latency. On top, we’ll show asynchronous materialized views over Iceberg and automatic query rewrite to pre-aggregated results: accelerating dashboards without copying data out of the lake.
You’ll leave with a pragmatic playbook: snapshot refresh cadence, small-file and delete-file hygiene, and when to use MVs so Iceberg stays lake-native while feeling warehouse-fast under real concurrency.
Anton Borisov is a Principal Data Engineer who architects 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.
🌟 Diving Deep into Booking.com's Iceberg Data Lake
At the enterprise level, a Lakehouse must solve data isolation and governance for petabyte-scale data sharing. Booking.com will detail the architecture of its BDX platform, which manages double-digit petabytes using Apache Iceberg™ as its foundational table format. In this joint presentation between Booking.com and Snowflake, you'll learn how to utilize Iceberg's open principles to implement a specialized IAM model along with catalogue federation patterns for secure, cross-platform data exchange and compliance.
Presented by Dimitar Nedev, Booking.com, and Dan Hunt, Snowflake!
🌟 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 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.
🌟 gophers on iceberg table maintenance and heading towards v3 specs
What's new with iceberg-go since Q1 2025 ?
- We recently introduced a few more table maintenance operations in pure golang (table compaction, snapshot expiration, time-travel queries)
- How we are adopting iceberg v3 spec, product roadmap in the coming months
Tung Dao
- Tung is a senior software engineer in the fintech industry
- Outside of work, he serves as part of a 7-member team of reviewer / maintainer for KEDA, a CNCF project
- Author of the popular repo kafka-in-production and flink-at-scale , which are curated lists of learning resources, blog post about Kafka and Flink
Notes
Apache Iceberg, Iceberg, Apache, Apache Spark, and the Apache Iceberg project logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. Copyright © 2025