IN-PERSON: Apache Kafka® x Apache Iceberg Meetup

Join us for an Apache Kafka® x Apache Iceberg® Meetup in Manchester from 6:00pm hosted by Social Refuge!

📍Venue:
Social Refuge
27 Great Ancoats St, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5AJ

IMPORTANT: spots are limited so please change your rsvp if you cannot attend.

🗓 Agenda:

• 6:00pm – 6:30pm: Food/Drinks and Networking
• 6:30pm - 7:00pm: Will Martin, EMEA Evangelist, Dremio
• 7:00pm - 7:30pm: Tom Scott, Founder & CEO, Streambased
• 7:30pm - 8:00pm: Q&A Networking

💡Speaker One:
Will Martin, EMEA Evangelist, Dremio

Title of Talk:
From Stream to Table: Building Kafka-to-Iceberg Pipelines

Abstract:
While Kafka excels at streaming data, the real challenge lies in making that data analytically useful without sacrificing consistency or performance. This talk explores why Apache Iceberg has emerged as the ideal streaming destination, offering ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel capabilities that traditional data lakes can't match. Learn about some foundational tools that enable streaming pipelines and why they all converge on this industry standard table format.

Bio:
Will Martin is the EMEA Evangelist at Dremio. Beginning with a background of statistical analysis in particle physics, his professional journey has spanned multiple industries, including banking, shipping logistics, entertainment, healthcare, defence, and customer 360. With experience as a data engineer, solutions architect, and software developer, he has spent 15+ years collaborating with companies and organisations across EMEA and APAC, including roles at CERN, Deloitte, and Tamr.

💡Speaker Two:
Tom Scott, Founder & CEO, Streambased

Title of Talk:
Turning the database inside out again: What if everything was Iceberg?

Abstract:
Over a decade ago, Martin Kleppmann's Turning the Database Inside Out reshaped how we think about data systems, putting the event stream at the heart of storage and computation. That vision inspired a generation of systems built atop Kafka, Flink, and event-driven materializations.

But what if we never finished what Martin started?

This talk takes the next leap, reimagining not just the transaction log, but the entire database through the lens of streaming. We'll keep Kafka as our canonical source of truth, but enrich it with the missing primitives: long-term storage, indexes, and projections. To achieve this, we'll move beyond Kafka's simple produce/consume model and embrace Apache Iceberg as the new foundation for durable, queryable event data.

Bio:
Long time enthusiast of Kafka and all things data integration, Tom has more than 15yrs experience in innovative and efficient ways to store, query and move data. Tom is currently CEO at Streambased a company focused on unifying operational and analytical data estates into a single, consistent and efficient data layer.

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If you are interested in hosting or speaking at a meetup, please email community@confluent.io