February Edition: Amazon Aurora DSQL and DB-OS Co-Design

We're excited to be back with another evening of deep database internals! This time we're diving into NewSQL and bare-metal performance – two talks that challenge how we think about database architecture from the ground up.
As always, there will be plenty of time for networking, discussions, and snacks 🍕.

Event Details:
📍 Venue: Amazon AWS, Oskar-von-Miller-Ring 20
📅 Date & Time: Thursday, February 19 2026, doors open at 18:30

Amazon Aurora DSQL: Serverless Distributed SQL at Unlimited Scale

Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL database with virtually unlimited scale, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management. Aurora DSQL offers the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes and makes it effortless for you to scale to meet any workload demand without database sharding or instance upgrades. With its active-active distributed architecture, Aurora DSQL ensures strong data consistency designed for 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability. Its serverless design removes the operational burden of patching, upgrades, and maintenance downtime. This technical session will explain how DSQL revolutionizes the architecture of relational databases to deliver these benefits.

About Speaker: Aychin Gasimov is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect for Data & AI at AWS.

QuinineHM: Replacing the OS for Bare-Metal Database Performance

We spent years optimizing database internals, only to have our performance eaten up by the one thing we can't control: the OS. General-purpose kernels are great for desktops, but for high-performance data infrastructure, they become the bottleneck.
In this talk I will introduce QuinineHM, a specialized "Hardware Manager," as a replacement for traditional operating systems in database workloads. We will begin by examining the "Why": how a general-purpose OS restricts database performance. Following this, we will explore the implementation of the Hardware Manager, detailing its structure, its distinctions from general-purpose OSes and unikernels, and the implementation challenges faced while building such a system. Finally, we will take a quick look at TonicDB, our bare-metal Redis-compatible store built on QuinineHM, and see the performance improvements.

About Speaker: Filip Obradovic is the CEO of Dataware.

Agenda:
🔹 18:30: Doors Open
🔹 18:40: Welcome
🔹 18:45: Talk #1: Aychin Gasimov (AWS)
🔹 19:30: Pizza & Networking 🍕
🔹 20:00: Talk #2: Filip Obradovic (QuinineHM)

Whether you're working on database internals, distributed systems, or bare-metal performance, expect an evening of practical implementation details and battle-tested approaches.