Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - March 2026 Helsinki Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Helsinki!
Join us for the very first Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in Helsinki! Our event is co-hosted by Aiven, Databircks 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.
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 - Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
🎙️ Anatolii Popov - Iceberg Topics: Kafka Tiered Storage as Iceberg Tables
7:10 pm – Networking break
🎙️ Robert Pack - Lightning Talk
7:40 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
How to Get to the Venue
Address:
Antinkatu 1, 00100 Helsinki
Building Access
Arriving to Aiven Office 7th floor event space:
The office entrance is next to the Fitness 24/7 gym entrance. When you arrive, please ring the 7th floor doorbell to be let in, then take the elevator to the 7th floor, where the meetup is hosted.
Signage will help you easily find the correct door and event space.
🪪 ID Requirements
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.
🌟 Iceberg Topics: Kafka Tiered Storage as Iceberg Tables
What if Kafka tiered storage wrote directly to Iceberg tables instead of opaque files?
We’ll show how a Kafka topic can be represented as an Iceberg table: produce messages, query them with Spark/Trino/DuckDB, and replay them through Kafka from the same cold data—two access patterns over one storage layer. We’ll dive into the implementation details behind Iceberg Topics in the open-source Aiven tiered storage plugin: write/read paths, a schema-aware custom Parquet reader for Avro type fidelity, and Kafka batch reconstruction from Iceberg rows. We’ll also cover the trade-offs when one table serves both replay and analytics: duplicates under retries, different partitioning needs for replay and SQL workloads, and retention coupling to Iceberg snapshots.
Anatolii Popov Senior Software Engineer at Aiven
Anatolii Popov is a Senior Software Engineer at Aiven, where he has spent five years building Kafka infrastructure, including the open-source tiered storage plugin for Apache Kafka. He is co-author of the Iceberg support for Kafka tiered storage presented in this talk and co-author of KIP-1150 (Kafka diskless topics).