• panelists: Andy Pavlo (CMU), Hannes Mühleisen (DuckDB),Allison Lee (Snowflake)
• moderator: Viktor Leis (TUM)
  
  

1. Keynote by Marcin Żukowski (co-founder Snowflake)
Title: A series of fortunate events. Or is it?”
Abstract: In this keynote Marcin will talk about his professional journey, starting with MonetDB, through Vectorwise, to Snowflake. He'll describe some of the key events on the way, the main lessons and biggest mistakes, and discuss how his path was shaped by hard work, amazing people, and sheer luck.
Bio: Marcin Żukowski is a computer scientist and entrepreneur, known for co-founding the high-performance analytical database company, Snowflake, and for his work on vectorized query execution during his PhD at CWI. He is in town because the day before this meetup he will receive the Dijkstra Fellowship.

2. Etienne Dilocker (Weaviate)
Title: Advances of Filtered Vector Search
Abstract: In the beginning, there were simple pre- and post-filtering methods to add filter support to vector retrieval. But filtered vector search has come a long way since then. Learn what Weaviate does to keep filter latencies down – no matter the scale
Bio: Etienne is the Co-Founder & CTO of Weaviate where he oversees building the Weaviate vector database and the ecosystem around it. Combining his passion for cloud-native engineering with new challenges of the AI age, Etienne is passionate about deep tech and modern architectures made for the ever-changing demands of today and tomorrow. In his previous roles, he led engineering teams building cloud-native applications for multi-national enterprise companies in the finance, retail, and wholesale industries.

3. Boaz Leskes (MotherDuck Amsterdam)
Title: MotherDuck: DuckDB + Cloud + your laptop = 60fps of UX Joy
Abstract:  In the age of ever more powerful hardware, where your laptop can do more than your typical Datacenter server, MotherDuck leverages DuckDB’s state of the art analytical prowess to drive compute down to your laptop as well as making the most of the Cloud. Combine DuckDB’s versatility to run everywhere (including your browser), augment it with a server-less CDW, and you get (interactive) analytical sessions delivering results in unprecedented speed. So fast it updates your dashboard in 60fps.
Bio: Boaz is part of MotherDuck’s founding team and leads its database group. In past life, he spent some years on distributed systems, (Elastic)search and cloud platforms. Will happily talk to any of these, or speed skating, kite surfing, rowing, or any other thing of interest.

4. Alexei Milovidov (ClickHouse)
Title: My Database Can Do This
Abstract: Relational databases have existed for 50 years. Still, there are constant attempts to re-introduce specialized databases for specific use cases, such as stream processing, time series data, web applications, geospatial analysis, graphs, and vector search. I will provide examples of specialized data models and applications and how they fit (or not fit) into my favorite analytical database, ClickHouse.
Bio: Alexey Milovidov, CTO of ClickHouse Inc. Alexey has 16 years of experience designing, developing, and operating data-intensive applications. He started work on ClickHouse in 2009 and initiated its release in open-source in 2016. Prior to ClickHouse he developed the data processing engine of the world's 2nd largest web analytics system. His area of interests is data processing algorithms and technologies. He loves data and high performance.

5. Bart Samwel (Databricks Amsterdam)
Title: Follow your rows (wherever they may go)
Abstract: This talk is about tracking row identities and changes in Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg tables. How can we assign dense, unique, and monotonically increasing identity sequence numbers while using optimistic concurrency? And how can we use this to efficiently derive the differences between arbitrary snapshot versions of a table?
Bio: Bart Samwel is a Principal Engineer at Databricks in Amsterdam. He takes at least partial blame for many recent Delta Lake innovations including Deletion Vectors, Liquid Clustering, and Row-Level Concurrency

Panel: what problems that are important to solve for data systems, but consistently ignored by researchers?

• Allison Lee , 

  Looking for VP of Engineering Allison Lee? You can try one of two places: her desk at Snowflake’s San Mateo office, or a hundred feet underwater.

  As one of Snowflake’s founding engineers, Allison’s passion for Snowflake technology spans over a decade. But alongside her long-standing dedication to Snowflake, is an even longer-standing love for scuba diving and ocean conservation. Not saying it’s a competition – she genuinely enjoys balancing the two pashttps://cwida.github.io/dbdbd2024/meetup/#viktor_leissions.

• Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs.  Hannes is also Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and a senior researcher at the CWI Database Architectures Group. His main interest are - shockingly - analytical data management systems.

• Andy Pavlo is an Associate Professor with Indefinite Tenure of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He knows some pile about databases, and is well known for leading research on self-driving databases and his engaging online lectures.

• Moderator: Viktor Leis is a Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and he has worked on systems such as Hyper, Umbra and LeanStore. His research focuses on designing cost-efficient data systems for the cloud.