Phoenix Data & AI

Name: Building applications on Lakebase: Postgres, Databricks Apps and AI in one place
Start: 2026-09-19T01:00:00.000Z
End: 2026-09-19T03:00:00.000Z
Location: 1530 East Williams Field Road

About us

Phoenix Data & AI is a community for data engineers, ML practitioners, analytics leaders, and AI builders across the Greater Phoenix metro area. We host talks, demos, and discussions on modern data platforms, with a strong focus on Databricks and the lakehouse ecosystem, alongside broader topics in AI development, MLOps, GenAI applications, and enterprise AI strategy.

Whether you're building pipelines, deploying models, or figuring out how to bring AI into production at your organization, this group is for you. Expect a mix of practitioner talks, vendor deep-dives, panel discussions, and networking with others solving similar problems in the Valley.

Topics we cover:

Databricks, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, and lakehouse architecture
Data engineering and pipeline design (Spark, dbt, Airflow, and beyond)
MLOps and model deployment at scale
GenAI and LLM application development
AI strategy for enterprises and teams adopting AI

New to the space or a seasoned practitioner — everyone's welcome. Come learn, share what you're building, and connect with the Phoenix data & AI community.

Featured event

Building applications on Lakebase: Postgres, Databricks Apps and AI in one place

Fri, Sep 18 · 6:00 PM MST

1530 East Williams Field Road, 1530 E Williams Field Rd, Gilbert, AZ 85295, USA, Gilbert, AZ, US

Our first meetup, on the question we get asked most this year: if Databricks has its own transactional database now, what does an application built on it actually look like?
Lakebase is a managed Postgres registered in Unity Catalog, with lakehouse tables synced into it and the operational data living beside the analytics under one set of permissions. That collapses a stack most teams run as three systems and two copy jobs. This session builds one application on it, live, and is honest about the edges.

What we'll build and show

- The application's own tables in Lakebase, and what a Postgres developer keeps and gives up
- Synced tables: a lakehouse table arriving in Postgres for the app to read, and how fresh it is
- A Databricks App on top, running in the workspace under its own service principal
- An agent answering questions over the same data through AI Gateway, inheriting the user's Unity Catalog grants
- Genie for the questions nobody wrote a screen for
- Where the seams are: what's GA, what's still in preview, and when we'd keep a separate database

Who's presenting

Preetham Reddy, founder and CEO of TechFabric, with engineers from our Databricks team. TechFabric is a Databricks partner in Gilbert with 80 Databricks-certified engineers, and we run our own business on the platform.

Agenda

6:00 Doors, food and drinks
6:30 Welcome, and what this group is for
6:40 Building on Lakebase, live
7:30 Questions, war stories, and what you'd like next
8:00 Close

Who it's for

Application developers, data engineers and architects in the Phoenix metro, on Databricks or considering it. If you run Postgres today and have been asked how it fits with the lakehouse, this is the session.
Venue: TechFabric, 1530 E Williams Field Rd, Ste 201, Gilbert, AZ 85295. Parking on site. Organised by TechFabric, https://www.techfabric.com