Robert Hodges

AI is delivering transformative changes to data management, but at the database level it looks like just another workload. So what is actually moving? New security threats are inevitable.

Manual analysis of thousands of daily database alerts is impossible—but AI changes everything. This talk demonstrates using modern AI tools to analyze internal alert databases and uncover critical patterns in ClickHouse database deployments.

Data lakes on open table formats like Iceberg are a popular way to manage large datasets for analytics, data science, and AI. This talk explains how data lakes work and how to adapt open source analytic stacks to use them. First, we’ll tour projects like Arrow, Iceberg, and Unity Catalog that...

AI is going to alter the world. Will it lead to a golden age, human extinction, or just one more technical advance? History tells us that the winners in the race will be those who best merge human capabilities with the power of AI.

Open source software is fun to work on, but building a real business is tough. We’ve all read about commercial open source companies that switched to proprietary models or flat went out of business.

Cloud data warehouses are the dominant life form for modern analytic systems. They work like restaurants where users visit to feed on data. Larger data sets, AI, and user decisions to keep information in their own data lakes are undermining the restaurant model.

There's not much doubt that databases now run well on Kubernetes: operators have matured, storage management works, and there are lots of success stories. What do you do now? Build your own data platform to replace expensive, proprietary cloud services! Argo CD and Flux make it possible to...

Analytic platforms are like cathedrals for data - and their foundations are cloud native. In this talk we’ll discuss the forces driving open source adoption, how cloud native enables flexible analytic applications, and what it means for systems being designed today.

Thanks to the Operator Pattern, Kubernetes is now an outstanding platform to run databases. But to quote Marathon Man, "is it safe?" This talk is a top-level review of the database security problem in Kubernetes, standard ways that operators can mitigate threats, and a wallet-sized checklist of...

MySQL servers routinely process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second on busy web properties. Analyzing those transactions is a different matter: For that, you need an analytic database like ClickHouse with column storage, efficient data compression, and parallel query. In this talk,...

Are you a ClickHouse fan? Want to make your apps faster? This talk introduces ClickHouse internals, focusing on how to make analytic queries faster and more efficient. We'll cover data insertion, aggregation, joins, and distributed queries. You'll learn about the basic flow of query execution,...

Columnar stores like ClickHouse enable users to pull insights from big data in seconds, but only if you set things up correctly. This talk will walk through how to implement a data warehouse that contains 1.3 billion rows using the famous NY Yellow Cab ride data. We'll start with basic data...