One Does Not Simply Query a Stream x Elastic

IMPORTANT PLEASE RSVP @ https://www.meetup.com/stockholm-elastic-fantastics/events/307842494/

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Join us on Tuesday, June 10th for a new meetup with the Elastic
Stockholm User Group!

We'll meet each other at Foo Café: doors open at 18.00 and we'll serve pizza and drinks. Presentations begin at 18.30. We wrap up at 20.15.

Address: Foo Café, Internetstiftelsen i Sverige, Hammarby Kajgata 10D, 120 30 Stockholm (website)

Agenda:
18.00 Doors open
18.15 Welcome
18.20 One Does Not Simply Query a Stream
19.00 Meet & Eat
19.30 ES|QL FTW!
20.15 Q&A
20.30 Wrap up

Talks:
One Does Not Simply Query a Stream
Streaming data with Apache Kafka® has become the backbone of modern applications. While streams are ideal for continuous data flow, they lack built-in querying capabilities. Unlike databases with indexed lookups, Kafka’s append-only logs are designed for high-throughput processing—not for on-demand queries. This necessitates additional infrastructure to query streaming data effectively.Traditional approaches replicate stream data into external stores: relational databases like PostgreSQL for operational queries, object storage like S3 accessed via Flink, Spark, or Trino for analytics, and Elasticsearch for full-text search and log analytics. Each serves a purpose—but they also introduce silos, schema mismatches, freshness issues, and complex ETL pipelines that increase system fragility.In this session, we’ll explore solutions that aim to unify operational, analytical, and search workloads across real-time data. We'll demonstrate stream processing with Kafka Streams, Apache Flink®, and SQL engines; real-time analytics with Apache Pinot®; search capabilities with Elasticsearch; and modern lakehouse approaches using Apache Iceberg® with Tableflow to represent Kafka topics as queryable tables. While there's no one-size-fits-all solution, understanding the tools and trade-offs will help you design more robust and flexible architectures.

Speaker: Viktor Gamov, Principal Developer Advocate, Confluent

ES|QL FTW!
NoSQL for years was associated with JSON. The thing is: if you're a hardcore backend Java developer, JSON, YAML, and other data formats might not feel native to you. Also, if you were ears-deep into debugging a query from Java code, sending the same request for visualization in Kibana using KQL wasn't trivial. Meet ES|QL: Elasticsearch's new query language, being at first glance a mixture of SQL and... Bash ;-) Works the same in Java and Kibana (and other programming languages too!)

Additionally, by leveraging Project Valhalla and vector operations, ES|QL can achieve performance improvements over previous solutions. If you're eager to investigate the options of the ES|QL and how it makes your life easier (while also giving a feel of being a SQL DB), this talk is for you.

Speaker: Eric Westberg, Principal Solutions Architect, Elastic