Future Data Systems Seminar Series — Fall 2025

Some people want to forget their past like when they worked at a religious pizza parlor in high school and they saw people shoot up in a motel bathtub. Databases are all about recording the events of the past. But we are interested in the question of what should a database system look like in the future to handle more of our past so we never forget.

The Carnegie Mellon University Database Research Group is exploring this question with the Future Data Systems Seminar Series. The talks in this series will present ideas on modern system architectures and technologies for storing, managing, and accessing databases.

All talks are on-line and open to the public via Zoom. You do not need to be a current CMU student to attend. Random people off of the internet are especially welcome. Videos will be posted on the CMU-DB YouTube Channel after each talk.

Schedule

	Date	Speaker	Talk Title	Video
Sep 22	Sep 22	Russell Spitzer	An Extremely Technical Overview of how the Apache Iceberg™ Planning Implementation Actually Works
Sep 29	Sep 29	Vinoth Chandar	Apache Hudi: A Database Layer over Cloud Storage for Fast Mutations and Efficient Queries
Oct 6	Oct 6	Jordan Tigani	DuckLake: Learning from Cloud Data Warehouses to Build a Robust “Lakehouse”
Oct 13	Oct 13	Will Manning	Vortex: LLVM for File Formats
Oct 20	Oct 20	Ian Cook	Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Rows: Columnar Data Connectivity with ADBC	—
Oct 27	Oct 27	Joyo Victor	Storage Metadata for Modern Cloud Databases	—
Nov 3	Nov 3	Ryan Johnson	DeltaLake	—
Nov 10	Nov 10	Cheng Chen	Mooncake	—
Nov 17	Nov 17	Benjamin Wagner	Firebolt	—
Nov 24	Nov 24	Jeremy Taylor	Reconstructing History with XTDB	—
Dec 1	Dec 1	Prashant Singh	From Storage Formats to Open Governance: The Evolution to Apache Polaris	—