Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - May 2026 Erlangen Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Erlangen!
Join us for the Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup! Our event is co-hosted by Siemens Healthineers, 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 May 7th https://forms.gle/asgJiB4e538fBcDf9
Agenda
4:30 pm – Registration & Networking
5:00 pm – 1st set of short talks
🎙️ Christian Thiel A Year at REST — What’s New in Iceberg REST Catalogs
🎙️ Arash Atarzadeh Lakehouse Architecture in Siemens Healthineers
🎙️ Olena Kutsenko The journey of a record from Kafka topic to analytics table
8:00 pm event closes
How to Get to the Venue
Siemens Healthineers Innovation Center
🪪 ID Requirements
Presentations & Speakers
🌟A Year at REST — What’s New in Iceberg REST Catalogs
Join us for a focused update on the Iceberg REST Catalog: what it is, why it matters, and the latest protocol advances. We’ll cover recent additions at a high level—ETags, idempotency‑key, view registration, table encryption keys, and extensions to server‑side planning—and outline community work in progress and its significance, including the Events Endpoint, enhanced OAuth2 support, and Fine‑Grained Metadata Commits.
Christian Thiel (Vakamo) is 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. Christian is all about crafting innovative solutions that make collaborating on data a breeze. With a long history as a data enthusiast and consultant, he’s built countless Data & Analytics solutions over the years, making him a passionate advocate for data-driven success.
🌟 The journey of a record from Kafka topic to analytics table
Modern data platforms increasingly rely on streaming systems like Apache Kafka as the source of truth—but turning event streams into reliable, queryable analytics tables is far from trivial.
This talk explores what really has to happen when moving data from a Kafka topic into an Apache Iceberg table. Beyond simple ingestion, we will walk through the essential steps: schema evolution, data normalization, partitioning, exactly-once guarantees, late-arriving events, and table maintenance.
Using Confluent Tableflow as one concrete example, we will examine how these challenges can be addressed in practice. Along the way, we will compare alternative approaches—such as Kafka Connect sinks, stream processing pipelines, and custom ingestion frameworks—to highlight trade-offs in correctness, latency, and operational complexity.
The goal is not to promote a single solution, but to provide a mental model for designing robust streaming-to-lakehouse pipelines, helping you understand what matters regardless of the tooling you choose.
Olena Kutsenko 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 at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.
A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. 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. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.
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