Opportunities in databases/data engineering and SQL

Dive into the trenches of modern data engineering with real-world war stories, practical how-to guides, and hard-won lessons from production environments. This session explores performance optimization strategies across MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Valkey, and MongoDB — from query tuning and indexing deep-dives to replication architecture and connection pooling under load.

Beyond the fundamentals, we’ll examine innovative use cases pushing these databases into new territory: vector search, time-series workloads, hybrid transactional-analytical patterns, and multi-model architectures. We’ll also chart the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud-native data infrastructure — managed services, Kubernetes-native operators, and serverless database paradigms — alongside the growing role of AI-driven tooling in schema design, anomaly detection, query generation, and intelligent caching with Valkey.

As a DBA navigating a legacy migration, a developer building your first distributed system, or an architect rethinking your data tier for the AI era, you’ll walk away with actionable techniques and a sharper view of where open-source data technology is headed.