Speakers:

Kurt Westerfeld , Mark Cusack

Date:

Tue Apr 14, 2026 @ 12:00pm EDT

Date:

Tue Apr 14, 2026

Time:

12:00pm EDT

Location:

GHC 9115

Title:

Floe: A SQL Query Service for the Modern Data Lakehouse

System:

Floe

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Talk Info:

We present Floe, a SQL query service designed for modern data lakehouse architectures. Floe combines three core components: FloeSQL, a compute engine for executing sophisticated SQL over open table formats; Floecat, an open-source catalog-of-catalogs that unifies metadata across Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake ecosystems; and Floescan, an indexing service that enables fine-grained data skipping within Parquet files.

Floe is motivated by the fragmentation of today’s lakehouse stack across formats, catalogs, and query engines. By bringing together high-performance query execution, unified metadata access, and file-level indexing, Floe applies proven architectural principles from Yellowbrick to the open data ecosystem, enabling faster and more consistent analytics on lakehouse data.

Bio:

Kurt Westerfeld is a Distinguished Engineer at FloeDB, where he is building the SaaS control plane and microservices platform for Floe, a SQL query service for modern data lakehouse architectures. Kurt joined Yellowbrick Data in 2015 and has spent over a decade developing core components of the Yellowbrick data warehouse. He has worked across startups and large enterprises including IBM and Oracle, and has held roles ranging from CTO to senior architect. His current work focuses on applying proven data warehouse architectures to open data ecosystems.

Mark Cusack is the CTO at FloeDB. Mark has worked in the data warehousing and advanced analytics space for the past 20 years. He was a co-founding developer at the data warehouse archiving company RainStor, which was acquired by Teradata in 2014. Mark holds a PhD in computational physics, and has worked in academia, government, startups and enterprises over the course of his career.