Rows & Columns Summit 2026
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Talks & recordings
4 connected sessions
Apache Iceberg: The Interoperability Layer Between OLTP and OLAP
Russell Spitzer, Principal Engineer and Apache Iceberg PMC member at Snowflake, on Iceberg as the interoperability layer between transactional and analytical systems. He starts from his DataStax years building Cassandra's analytics integrations, including Apache Pig, and the pattern they used to move data out: a select star broken into many bounded queries, which is still how the Spark JDBC driver works. Why that pattern has neither atomicity -- records arrive from different moments of the scan -- nor transactional semantics, so a job that fails halfway through a batch of upserts cannot be wound back.
Arun Sharma, LadybugDB - Interview with Alexy
Arun Sharma, founder of LadybugDB and Ladybug Memory, interviewed by Alexy Khrabrov at the Rows & Columns Summit. LadybugDB continues Kuzu, the embedded graph database developed at the University of Waterloo whose team was acquired by Apple: a well-regarded codebase with published research behind it and no community, which Sharma has spent eleven months building one around, with Ladybug Memory supporting the work and aimed at agentic memory. Before that, five years at Google and then Facebook, where he built a graph indexing system sitting beside the world's largest MySQL cluster, listening to its write-ahead log and built on RocksDB as its very first user, and in 2018 prototyped what today looks like Amazon DSQL.
Diving Through Data at OpenAI: How a Data Agent Navigates 70,000 Datasets
Bonnie Xu of OpenAI on the internal data agent her team built. Nearly the whole company uses the data platform: over 600 petabytes processed a day across roughly 70,000 datasets, with about 200,000 queries run in production daily, and growing fast. When ChatGPT launched the question was how many weekly active users there were; now it is how many instant checkout users are on Chat Pro in Japan -- the same shape of question, far more nuanced, and today it costs five Slack threads and two meetings. Why table discovery is the hard part at that scale, where similarly named tables hold different cohorts, team-specific views and columns added weeks later.
Notes from the Rows & Columns Summit 2026
Alexy Khrabrov's recording from the floor of the Rows & Columns Summit, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on 22 September 2026 -- a practitioner-first, single-track conference on the architecture question that will not go away: OLTP and OLAP, together or apart. Andy Pavlo opened the day, and Hannes Muehleisen, co-founder and creator of DuckDB, argued that nobody knows what OLTP is and that DuckDB is moving to the middle. Alexy's own frame is fast access to data in real time set against transactional access, and why merging the two is becoming paramount for agents of every kind. He closes by saying the interviews he recorded at the summit will appear on struct.fm alongside the back catalogue.
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