Java Athens Meetup

Join us for a live, a collaborative event between the Java Athens group and the Athens Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent!
We will ride the Kafka stream together with Viktor Gamov, Principal Developer Advocate from Confluent, Java Champion and all around Kafka rockstar🎸!

📍Location

• Michalakopoulou 80 street, XM
• Attendees should say they are there for the Java Athens meetup.

📆 Date & Time

• 5th of November 2025, 19:00

🗒️ Agenda

• 19:00 - Intro, Agenda
• 19:05 - A message from our sponsors - XM/Confluent
• 19:10 - Kafka @XM by Spyros Angelopoulos - Nikos Stathis
• 19:20 - "One Does Not Simply Query a Stream" by Viktor Gamov
• 20:00 - Q&A Session
• 20:15 - Pizza 🍕 time

Main Talk:
One Does Not Simply Query a Stream
Suppose you have embraced Apache Kafka as the core of your data infrastructure. In that case, you have probably integrated event-driven services to communicate with each other through topics, combined with legacy systems through an ecosystem of connectors, and responded more or less in real-time to things happening in the world outside your software. Immutable logs of events form a more robust backbone than the one-database-to-rule-them-all of your profound monolith past. Your stack is more evolvable, responsive, and easier to work with. However, you might face a challenge now that everything is a stream - how do you query things? Although you may name at least one or two ways off the top of your head, it's time you think through how to make the choice. In this talk, we'll explore the solutions currently in use for asking questions about the contents of a topic, including Kafka Streams, the various streaming SQL implementations, your favorite relational database, your favorite data lake, and real-time analytics databases like Apache Pinot. There is no single correct answer to the question, so as responsible builders of systems, we must understand our options and the trade-offs they present to us. You'll leave this talk even more satisfied that you've embraced Kafka as the heart of your system and are ready to deploy the right choice for querying the logs that hold your data.

Bio:
Viktor Gamov is a Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®. With a rich background in implementing and advocating for distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, Viktor excels in open-source technologies. He is passionate about assisting architects, developers, and operators in crafting systems that are not only low in latency and scalable but also highly available.

As a Java Champion and an esteemed speaker, Viktor is known for his insightful presentations at top industry events like JavaOne, Devoxx, Kafka Summit, and QCon. His expertise spans distributed systems, real-time data streaming, JVM, and DevOps.

Viktor has co-authored "Enterprise Web Development" from O'Reilly and "Apache Kafka® in Action" from Manning.

Follow Viktor on X - @gamussa to stay updated with Viktor's latest thoughts on technology, his gym and food adventures, and insights into open-source and developer advocacy.