Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - Dec 2025 Munich Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Munich!
Join us for the Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in Munich! Our event is co-hosted by Firebolt, dltHub and Vakamo.
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
🎙️ Viktor Kessler, Vakamo - Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
🎙️ Ismail Simsek Unifying Operational and Analytical Data with Debezium Iceberg Consumer
🎙️ Lorenz Hübschle Low-Latency Analytics on Apache Iceberg
7:20 pm – 7:40 pm Networking break
🎙️ Katharina Lenz The Lightest Iceberg Setup: Going Catalog-less with dlt
🎙️ Roland Wammers Making a Case for native Iceberg Catalog APIs in AI Workloads
8:15 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
How to Get to the Venue
Address:
Karlsplatz 3, 80335 München
Building Access
6th floor, entrance is in the courtyard behind Sixt
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.
🌟 Unifying Operational and Analytical Data with Debezium Iceberg Consumer
Apache Iceberg and Debezium have emerged as industry standards in data lake table formats and change data capture (CDC), respectively. Both projects boast active development and robust community support, making them trusted foundations for modern data architectures. This talk will introduce the Debezium Iceberg Consumer, a solution that combines these two technologies. We'll explore how it simplifies the replication of operational data to data lakes and analytical systems in a cost-effective, near real-time manner, while enabling a rich set of features. A brief demonstration will showcase the seamless transfer of data from an operational source to an analytical data layer.
Ismail Simsek is a Data and Analytics Engineer specializing in data analytic architectures, data warehousing, analytic use cases, and solutions. He focuses on helping businesses unlock the value of their data efficiently and seamlessly. Ismail also contributes to the open-source community by developing data analytics solutions under the memiiso GitHub organization.
🌟 Low-Latency Analytics on Apache Iceberg
With Iceberg, we are seeing a real open storage ecosystem emerging across database vendors for the first time. So far, open table formats have found little adoption powering low-latency, high-concurrency analytics use cases. Data stored in open formats often gets transformed and ingested into closed systems for serving. The reason for this is simple: most modern query engines don’t properly support these workloads. In this talk we take a look under the hood of Firebolt and dive into the work we’re doing to support low-latency and high concurrency on Iceberg: the architecture of our parquet reader, caching of data and metadata, adaptive object storage reads, subresult reuse, and intelligent use of metadata.
Lorenz Hübschle leads Firebolt's storage team, which spends a lot of its time on bringing Firebolt's low-latency capabilities to Iceberg. Recently, the team and he rebuilt Firebolt’s parquet scan from the ground up to support first-class Iceberg scans and implement the advanced optimisations covered in this talk.
🌟 The Lightest Iceberg Setup: Going Catalog-less with dlt
Setting up an Iceberg data lake often feels heavier than the data work itself. But many pipelines don’t need the complexity of choosing and deploying a catalog, especially for early-stage setups like startups and scale-ups.This talk shows how to start with the lightest possible Iceberg setup using open-source dlt. We’ll cover “one writer - multiple readers” pattern and show:
how to create fully compliant Iceberg tables with a ephemeral, in-memory, SQLite-based Iceberg catalogue
how engines like DuckDB can provide easy access to those tables
how to manually register tables in multiple catalogs
Finally, we’ll look at the upgrade path for teams that later need multi-user coordination, including how dltHub’s Iceberg destination integrates with production-grade REST catalogs, providing Iceberg management at scale.
Katharina Lenz is a Solutions Engineer at dltHub, where she helps
teams build AI-ready data pipelines using the open-source library dlt. With a background in data engineering and analytics, she focusses on making modern data stack technologies accessible and production-ready for organization of all sizes.
🌟 Making a Case for native Iceberg Catalog APIs in AI Workloads
We all know that AI relies on data - lots of it - and that Iceberg is probably best-placed to tame large amounts of data and harvest information from it. But how can you leverage an Iceberg catalog to align governance, scale and manageability at the same time - and get all of this within your own security perimeter? In this session we'll explore a well-integrated approach and show how it helps to build a platform that can support both analytics and AI in order to tackle today's and tomorrow's challenges.
Roland Wammers has a background in data analytics, big data and AI and has worked in numerous projects at various organizations. After several years as a presales consultant in the analytics and database industry, he's now a field CTO at MinIO, helping organizations adopt object storage as the foundation for their current and future projects in the space.
Notes
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