[Future Data] Why Powering User Facing Applications on Iceberg is Hard
- Speaker:
- Benjamin Wagner
- Date:
- Mon Nov 17, 2025 @ 04:30pm EST
- Date:
- Mon Nov 17, 2025
- Time:
- 04:30pm EST
- Location:
- https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96274590594?pwd=ZIhPZi8CFwaVd5kN9sS5uEiuWanTCa.1Zoom
- Title:
- Why Powering User Facing Applications on Iceberg is Hard
- System:
- Firebolt
- Video:
- YouTube
Talk Info:
Firebolt is a Postgres compliant analytical database built for low-latency, high-concurrency analytics. These applications are usually powered by our fully managed storage and metadata layers. They support efficient caching and indexing, all while having multi-writer consistency. More recently, we’ve been investing heavily into our support for Apache Iceberg. Iceberg is not built to serve these types of low-latency applications. This talk reviews our past year of progress in allowing Firebolt users to still power such workloads on top of their Iceberg tables. We give a deep dive on the compromises you have to make, the things we’ve built, and what we plan to build in the months to come.
This talk is part of the Future Data Systems Seminar Series.
Bio:
Benjamin is the VP of Engineering at Firebolt. He works with the teams on building the fastest and most cost-effective analytical query engine for modern data-intensive applications. Recently, a lot of that work has focused on bringing Firebolt's capabilities to the Iceberg ecosystem. Benjamin first fell in love with database systems while studying computer science at the Technical University of Munich.