From transaction to insight to agent

Operational data used to live in one world and analytics in another — separated by brittle ETL, hours of latency, and a copy of your data you couldn't trust.

This month we're closing that gap. We've got a hands-on look at Lakebase and the Lakehouse working as one system, a talk from the team at Slalom, and - because the best answers in this group usually come from the room rather than the stage — a proper open round where we crowdsource solutions to whatever people are actually stuck on right now.

Slalom are hosting us, and there will be pizza and drinks. Come hungry, come with a problem you'd like to discuss or just help others to brainstorm on theirs!

🎤 Talk 1 — Closing the operational/analytical gap with Lakebase and Lakehouse
Speaker: Vysnavi Mohan, Databricks
Operational data used to live in one world and analytics in another — separated by brittle ETL, hours of latency, and a copy of your data you couldn't trust. We close this gap with Lakebase and Lakehouse.
We write live application state into Lakebase, Databricks' managed Postgres transactional engine, and watch it sync automatically into Unity Catalog as a governed Delta table — no pipelines to babysit, no reverse-ETL tax. On top of that synced table we've built an analytics view that serves fresh insights the moment a transaction lands.
You'll walk away knowing:

• Where Lakebase fits next to the Lakehouse, and what it's not for
• How the managed sync into Unity Catalog actually behaves — and what governance you inherit for free
• What it takes to serve analytics off live application state, without a pipeline in the middle

🎤 Talk 2 - Grounded, Governed, Useful: Enterprise AI Agents on Databricks
Speaker: Morty Mahzoon, Slalom.
Morty will share some exciting things Slalom team are working on, including Genie, Omnigent, Knowledge Bases and more!
AI agents are easy to prototype, but much harder to make accurate, secure and useful at enterprise scale. This session explores how Databricks capabilities such as Unity AI Gateway, Genie Ontology, knowledge bases and Omnigent can help organisations build governed agents grounded in trusted data and business context.

🧠 Open round - what are you actually stuck on?
The part we keep hearing people come back for. We go around the room, collect the real problems people are wrestling with this quarter - migration pain, governance sprawl, streaming costs, a model nobody trusts, whatever it is - and put them to the group. Someone here has almost certainly solved your problem already.
Bring one problem you'd genuinely like a second opinion on. No slides needed, no need to have it figured out.

Call for speakers
Want to talk at a future meetup? We're always after speakers — 10-minute lightning talks count, and first-timers are very welcome. Comment below or message the organisers!