Apache Iceberg™ Europe Community Meetup - Nov 2025 Budapest Edition
Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup - live in Budapest!
Join us for the very first Apache Iceberg™ Europe Meetup in Budapest co-hosted by Cloudera, Microsoft 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
🎙️ Gábor Kaszab REST Catalog Basics You Were Afraid To Ask
🎙️ Attila Papp Mastering Change Data Capture with Apache Iceberg
🎙️Attila Turoczy Back in Time with Iceberg
7:20 - 7:40 pm – Networking break
🎙️ Peter Vary Opening up Iceberg for new File Formats
🎙️ Viktor Kessler - Apache Iceberg REST Catalog: What’s New and What’s Next
8:15 pm – More Networking
9:00 pm – Event close
How to Get to the Venue
Address:
Budapest, Széchenyi István tér 7, 1051 Hungary
Presentations & Speakers
🌟 REST Catalog Basics You Were Afraid To Ask
Ever wondered what the REST catalog support in Apache Iceberg actually means? In this talk, we’ll break it down from the ground up. We’ll look at what’s in fact included in the library (and what’s not), peek under the hood at the REST interface specification, and then follow a real-world example to see how table management works in practice. By the end, you’ll know exactly what messages are flying back and forth—and why they matter.
Gábor Kaszab has spent the past eight years building and improving open-source projects in the big data world. He’s a PMC member on Apache Impala and an active contributor to Apache Iceberg, with a special interest in making Iceberg work seamlessly with Impala. Today, as part of Microsoft’s GSL team, Gábor enjoys the freedom to shape table formats to meet current and next-generation use cases—and loves sharing what he learns along the way.
🌟 Mastering Change Data Capture with Apache Iceberg
Change Data Capture (CDC) is a critical pattern for modern data architectures, enabling efficient incremental processing and real-time analytics. Apache Iceberg's time-travel and metadata capabilities make it uniquely suited for implementing CDC patterns at scale. This talk demystifies CDC implementation with Iceberg, providing practical insights and ready-to-use PySpark code examples that attendees can immediately apply to their data pipelines.
Attila Papp: Team Lead & Cloud Architect (AWS SA-Pro, Azure Architect Expert, FinOps) with 7 years transforming enterprise data infrastructures. Recently architected and delivered Porsche's AWS-native data mesh & analytics platform from concept to production, now powering 100+ analysts with real-time insights. Specialized in Apache Iceberg implementations, having deployed CDC patterns that reduced processing costs by 70% while improving data freshness from hours to minutes. Former IBM Solution Architect and global AWS guild lead with strong Java/Spring foundations and DevOps mindset. Currently pursuing PhD research in next-generation data engineering architectures.
🌟Back in Time with Iceberg
To understand Apache Iceberg, we first need to go back in time and explore the challenges that led to its creation. In this session, we’ll look at why the industry needed Iceberg, what motivations and design decisions shaped it, and how it evolved into the open table format we know today.
With this perspective, you’ll gain a clear understanding of the current implementation and the problems Iceberg is solving in modern data platforms.
Attila Turoczy is a Senior Director of Engineering at Cloudera, where he leads teams responsible for core data warehouse innovation. His team successfully integrated Apache Iceberg into Apache Hive and Apache Impala, enabling open table formats and modern data lakehouse capabilities across Cloudera’s hybrid platform.
🌟 Opening up Iceberg for new File Formats
Data lakes have become central to modern data engineering, analytics, and AI, largely powered by open table formats like Iceberg and file formats such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro. While Parquet dominates due to its strong community support and interoperability, emerging trends—such as ML workloads, GPU-accelerated analytics, and cloud optimization—demand capabilities beyond traditional formats. Next-generation formats like Vortex and Lance offer advanced features such as random access, vector encodings, indexing, and optimized IO for high-latency environments, making them ideal for ML and GPU use cases. To address these needs, Iceberg community is working on a new FileFormat API and test harness proposal to standardize integration, maintain backward compatibility, and enable exploration of modern formats without compromising its vision of interoperability. This session will compare traditional and modern formats, share initial results, and the current state of file format support in Iceberg.
Peter Vary is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft and a PMC member of both Apache Iceberg and Apache Hive. His work centers on data storage, sharing, and querying. Previously, Peter played a key role in enhancing Hive transactional performance, which led to the integration of Iceberg as a new table format within Hive. Before joining Microsoft, he spearheaded the Flink–Iceberg integration at Apple and earlier led the Hungarian Hive Engineering team at Cloudera.
🌟 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.
Notes
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