Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - Nov 2025 Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Hamburg!
Join us for the very first Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in Hamburg! Our event is hosted in the 2nd Floor by Sparkassen Innovation Hub co-hosted by Star Finanz, CelerData 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
🌟 Christian Thiel (Vakamo): Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
🌟 George Zubrienko & Vitalii Savitskii (ECCO): Real world example: Apache Iceberg for open-source data streaming
🌟 Sven Möller (Star Finanz): Migrating Data from legacy analytics DB to Iceberg Lakehouse using DuckDB
7:20 - 7:40 pm – Networking break
🌟 Ron Kapoor (CelerData) Real-Time Customer-Facing Analytics: From Pain to Production
🌟 Jan Kaul (Dashbook) Airberg: Simplified Data Ingestion for Apache Iceberg
8:20 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
How to Get to the Venue
Address:
Grüner Deich 15, 20097 Hamburg, Germany
https://maps.app.goo.gl/awQHpBgB7PCE1Z458
Presentations & Speakers
🌟 Christian Thiel (Vakamo):
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.
🌟 George Zubrienko & Vitalii Savitskii (ECCO):
Real world example: Apache Iceberg for open-source data streaming
This talk dives into a real-world use case showcasing how Apache Iceberg empowers our fully open-source data ingestion and real-time streaming stack. We will explore the integration of Apache Iceberg with our self-developed and open-sourced tool, Arcane, highlighting the synergies that optimize our data workflows.
The presentation includes an overview of Apache Iceberg developer experience across key dimensions such as table maintenance, API usability, and performance on existing resources. Attendees will gain insights into how Iceberg is superior and comes with additional features such as automatic partitioning and seamless authentication to data catalogues through OpenID Connect.
Join us to uncover the architecture of our open-source data pipeline, the challenges we encountered, and the solutions Apache Iceberg provided for real-time data operations.
🌟 Sven Möller (Star Finanz):
Migrating Data from legacy analytics DB to Iceberg Lakehouse using DuckDB
In this talk I'll show how we are going to migrate an old analytics system based on a MySQL 5.x to an Iceberg Lakehouse
🌟 Ron Kapoor (CelerData)
Real-Time Customer-Facing Analytics: From Pain to Production
This talk dives into technical optimizations that deliver low-latency, high-concurrency queries on Apache Iceberg without sacrificing openness. Together, we'll examine what kills performance when querying Iceberg, highlight best practices that make queries faster, and evaluate query engine optimizations for Iceberg—including handling position and equality delete tables, distributed metadata parsing, and more. You'll hear real-world stories from leading enterprises who have used these lessons to optimize Apache Iceberg performance at scale and walk away with actionable techniques for making your Iceberg lakehouse faster than ever.
🌟 Jan Kaul (Dashbook):
Airberg: Simplified Data Ingestion for Apache Iceberg
Traditional EL (Extract-Load) platforms like Airbyte offer powerful capabilities but come with significant operational complexity: persistent servers, external state management, and infrastructure overhead. Airberg takes an opinionated approach by focusing exclusively on Apache Iceberg as the destination, dramatically simplifying the ingestion architecture.
At its core, Airberg uses stateless Docker containers to ingest data from Airbyte sources directly into Iceberg tables. By eliminating the need for persistent services, Airberg reduces operational complexity while leveraging Iceberg's native capabilities for state management—all synchronization state lives within the Iceberg table itself, not in external databases or filesystems.
This architecture enables powerful deployment patterns: you can run data ingestion as simple Docker commands in CI/CD pipelines, scheduled jobs, or serverless environments. No clusters to maintain, no databases to manage, no persistent state to backup—just configuration files and Docker.
In this talk, I'll demonstrate Airberg's simplicity through a live demo where we ingest data using nothing more than a GitHub Action. We'll explore how this stateless approach challenges conventional EL architecture while maintaining full compatibility with Airbyte's extensive source connector ecosystem. Whether you're building a lakehouse on a budget or seeking to reduce operational overhead, Airberg shows how Iceberg-first thinking can transform your data ingestion strategy.
Notes
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