Percona Live 2026 Bay Area Talk: What’s a Data Lake and What Does It Mean For My Open Source Stack?

CONFERENCE TALK

Percona Live 2026 Bay Area Talk: What’s a Data Lake and What Does It Mean For My Open Source Stack?

Our CEO, Robert Hodges, will be speaking at Percona Live 2026 Bay Area, in Mountain View, California.

Data lakes on open table formats like Iceberg are a popular way to manage large datasets for analytics, data science, and AI.

This talk explains how data lakes work and how to adapt open source analytic stacks to use them.

First, we’ll tour projects like Arrow, Iceberg, and Unity Catalog that make data lakes possible. Next, we’ll see how analytic engines like DuckDB, ClickHouse®, and Spark are adapting. Finally, we’ll survey a few projects that enable applications written in Python, Golang, or Rust to deliver fast queries. You’ll have to build the app yourself, but this talk will show you a path to use data lakes and open source successfully.

About the Presenter

Robert Hodges – CEO at Altinity

Robert Hodges serves as CEO at Altinity, a leading software and services provider for ClickHouse®. Robert has more than 30 years of experience with database systems and applications, including pre-relational databases such as M204, online SQL transaction processing, Hadoop, and analytics. In the last few years, his work has focused on analytical databases, Kubernetes, and open source.