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Why You Shouldn’t Care About Iceberg

Ryan Blue Ryan Blue | Creator of Apache Iceberg, Member of Technical Staff | Databricks

Ryan Blue, co-creator of the Apache Iceberg project will try to convince you not to care about Iceberg: if you’re thinking about your table format, then it isn’t doing a good enough job.

This session will show how Iceberg solves real-world problems that used to take hours or days of time from data engineers and analysts:

  • Safe schema changes — no more zombie data columns
  • Layout evolution — update table partitioning without rewriting any queries
  • Hidden partitioning — safe and fast queries without being a DBA
  • Future work — current frustrations and how we’re making them disappear
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Ryan Blue
Ryan Blue
Creator of Apache Iceberg, Member of Technical Staff | Databricks

Ryan Blue is the original creator of Apache Iceberg and currently serves as Vice President of the project. With over a decade in data engineering, he's an established expert in big data formats and infrastructure. Currently a Member of Technical Staff at Databricks since June 2024, Ryan previously co-founded and served as CEO of Tabular until its acquisition by Databricks. His career includes senior positions at Netflix and Cloudera, where he was a technical lead for data formats. An Apache Software Foundation member since 2017, he's a committer in the Apache Parquet, Avro, and Spark communities and previously served as VP of Apache Avro. Ryan holds dual Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Idaho and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

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