The first Data & Drinks event of 2025 took place in Amsterdam on January 23, hosted by Xomnia at their HQ. This edition focused on Apache DataFusion, drawing a highly technical audience eager to explore its real-world applications and inner workings. Data & Drinks is an interactive event series that brings together data professionals from AI-driven companies to share their knowledge and insights from the data & AI world.
The event featured talks from three DataFusion contributors—Andrew Lamb, Mehmet Ozan Kabak, and Jan Kaul—who took the stage to dive deep into the technology. Being the exclusive focus of an event series with a strong technical following was a significant milestone for the DataFusion community in Europe. The audience’s enthusiasm led to insightful discussions on current and future use cases of DataFusion.
All in all, we left Amsterdam with great new connections and fresh inspiration!
Full recording of the event: Data & Drinks: Building Next-Gen Data Systems with Apache DataFusion
Talks
Apache DataFusion PMC Chair Andrew Lamb from InfluxDB delivered the first talk of the event and delved into the architecture, modularity, and tradeoffs of Apache DataFusion, and how it's employed in building advanced data systems.
Next, it was our Co-Founder & CEO, Apache DataFusion PMC Mehmet Ozan Kabak’s turn to talk about how DataFusion’s modular architecture enables the vision of unified compute engines.
Lastly, Jan Kaul, Founder & CEO of Dashbook, explored the implementation of materialized views in Apache Iceberg using DataFusion.
We were thrilled to witness the growing recognition of Apache DataFusion in the European data ecosystem, as its real-world applications and cutting-edge innovations continue to capture industry interest. The event drew an impressive and data-driven crowd, with 110+ attendees RSVP’d, reflecting the strong momentum and enthusiasm around DataFusion’s capabilities and future potential.
Special thanks to our hosts, Xomnia, for organizing the event.