Pittsburgh, PA — The Carnegie Mellon University Database Group is stoked to announce its Future Data Systems Seminar Series for Fall 2025. It is a forward-looking lecture series devoted to the evolving lakehouse ecosystem, especially Apache Iceberg and adjacent systems. This program offers an intellectual forum for exploring how next-generation architectures can better record, query, mutate, and maintain data at scale. Rather than spotlighting individual names, the series is conceived as a collective exploration of what the future of data systems should embody. In an age where data is everything, this seminar series asserts that databases must evolve to remember more to enable innovation at street tempos.

In an homage to how technological and cultural innovation often pulse in tandem, the series embraces the drive to disrupt, to remix, to reconcile tradition and transformation. As the Wu-Tang Clan once declared, “Cash Rules Everything Around Me”, a reminder that systems like beats and rhymes must move value, memory, and meaning through time. With this seminar series, CMU-DB invites participants to treat Iceberg and its kin as part of a lyrical lineage: architectures derived from past patterns, but reinterpreted for new flows and new rhythms of scale. It’s not just about tables and files. It’s about the breakbeats of storage, the flows of queries, and the reinvention of data as an expressive medium.

CMU-DB’s seminar meetings (Mondays @ 4:30pm EST) are open to the public on Zoom. Non-CMU affiliated members of the general public are invited to attend. The recordings are available on the CMU-DB Youtube Channel afterwards.

Schedule

• September 22 — Apache Iceberg
• September 29 — Apache Hudi
• October 6 — MotherDuck
• October 13 — SpiralDB / Vortex
• October 20 — Columnar
• October 27 — SingleStore
• November 3 — Delta Lake
• November 10 — Mooncake
• November 17 — Firebolt
• November 24 — XTDB
• December 1 — Apache Polaris