From Streams to Lakehouses with Kafka, Flink & Iceberg

Agenda:
17:00 – Welcome
17:10 – Rocco Schulz, Kafka Engineer, SPOUD: The role of Kafka and Flink in a Stream-Native Data Lakehouse Architecture (English)
17:50 – Will Martin, EMEA Evangelist, Demio: From Stream to Table: Building Kafka-to-Iceberg Pipelines (English)
18:20 – Networking & Apéro

We are looking forward to welcoming you again. See you soon!

This event is sponsored by Dremio. Thanks a lot for supporting the community!

The Role of Kafka and Flink in a Stream-Native Data Lakehouse Architecture (Rocco Schulz)
Abstract: Traditional batch-based data architectures struggle with real-time demands. A Stream-Native Data Lakehouse unifies streaming and batch processing to deliver fresh, reliable data. In this talk, we’ll explore how Kafka serves as the immutable backbone for all data streams, while Flink continuously processes and transforms data into open table formats like Apache Iceberg—bridging the gap between streaming and analytics.

From Stream to Table: Building Kafka-to-Iceberg Pipelines (Will Martin)
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 next-generation table format built for flexibility and scalability.

Will Martin is the EMEA Evangelist at Dremio with experience as a data engineer, academic, technology consultant, and software developer. His career includes roles at CERN, BMT, Deloitte, and Tamr. He has spent 15+ years collaborating with companies and organisations across EMEA and APAC, working to understand their unique problems and to deliver targeted, technical solutions. Starting with a background of statistical analysis in particle physics, his professional journey has spanned multiple industries, including banking, shipping logistics, entertainment media, healthcare, defence, and customer 360.