Theme Modern applications are pushing databases in new directions: distributed architectures, AI-driven workloads, global-scale deployments, and increasingly strict reliability and security requirements. expand
Modern applications are pushing databases in new directions: distributed architectures, AI-driven workloads, global-scale deployments, and increasingly strict reliability and security requirements.
At this special Rootconf edition, we invite talks that explore how databases are designed, operated, optimized, and sometimes broken. We are particularly interested in submissions that bridge research insights and production experience.
Production incidents that reshaped your architecture
Unexpected performance regressions
Lessons from large-scale database migrations
When theory met reality
If your talk fits the broader theme of building or operating modern databases, we encourage you to submit even if it doesn’t fall neatly into the categories above.
You upgrade your embedding model. The new one is better, obviously. Your recall improves on benchmarks, your vectors are more expressive, and everything looks great in staging. Then you deploy it to production where 50 million vectors were indexed with the old model. Suddenly nothing works. New queries return garbage results because the old vectors and new vectors live in completely different geo… more
2 comments
Submitted
15 Mar 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
You have 10,000 tenants sharing one database. Each tenant wants vector search over their own data. Do you build one giant index and filter at query time? Or 10,000 small indexes that each need their own memory budget? Both answers are wrong in interesting ways. more
1 comment
Submitted
15 Mar 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Description Databases were not designed for agents. They were built around a set of implicit assumptions: callers issue predictable queries, connections are short-lived, bad queries fail loudly, and schemas are a contract with engineers. Agentic systems break every one of these assumptions. Agents reason their way to queries, hold connections while an LLM thinks, retry operations unpredictably, a… more
1 comment
Submitted
01 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Description Modern applications demand more than simple keyword matching. In this session, we’ll walk through how Bleve (an open-source full-text and vector search library) powers Couchbase’s Search service. more
3 comments
Submitted
14 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Introduction Over the past few years, the center of gravity in data systems has begun to shift. While traditional database workloads were dominated by deterministic transactions and analytical queries, both industry and academic evidence now point to a rapid rise in AI-driven, token-based workload. Analysts estimate that 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, yet historically underutilized. Toda… more
0 comments
Submitted
16 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: Birds of Feather (BOF) proposals – discussion on focussed topics
Description In distributed systems engineering, a design that is “correct on paper” is only the beginning; the real challenge is making it “fast in reality.” This session offers a transparent post-mortem of the architectural assumptions we made while building a distributed key-value store from scratch in Go, and why several of those assumptions collapsed under production-grade pressure. We’ll mov… more
1 comment
Submitted
25 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Ever since Patrick O’Neil’s seminal 1996 paper, Log-Structured Merge Trees (LSM Trees) have paved the way for storage systems with excellent write-time performance while keeping read-time performance very competitive. As data volumes grow, the LSM Tree emerges as the ideal storage system for large volumes of high-throughput data. With the rise of AI Systems and with humans generating more data th… more
1 comment
Submitted
25 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Vector search is increasingly central to AI applications, yet it is often implemented as an external system disconnected from relational query processing. This talk examines the challenges of implementing vector search inside a mature relational database, using SQL Server as a case study. We show that the key difficulty lies not in ANN algorithms themselves, but in integrating similarity search w… more
2 comments
Submitted
27 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Problem: Organizations routinely need to give different user groups access to production data but protecting sensitive information like PII, financial records, or healthcare data is important. Traditional approaches like maintaining separate sanitized datasets, creating masked views, or implementing application-level redaction each come with significant tradeoffs: data duplication, synchronizatio… more
2 comments
Submitted
27 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
{Describe your session in 2 paragraphs} This talk is built around a single production incident: a batch pipeline that had run reliably for 47 consecutive nights, processing between 200 to 300 million rows and feeding a dashboard that an operations team depended on every morning that silently collapsed on night 48. No code changed. No configuration changed. By 9am, with a P1 raised and the dashboa… more
3 comments
Submitted
29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
Abstract For critical distributed systems, data durability is the ultimate operational baseline. However, at extreme scales, handling millions of OLTP operations per second across petabyte-sized datasets, traditional backup strategies often become the very bottleneck they were designed to prevent. more
2 comments
Submitted
29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Abstract In highly coordinated distributed systems like Apache HBase, operations often rely on global barriers, synchronized procedures that require every node to reach a consensus point before moving forward. At extreme scales, these barriers become highly sensitive to thread contention and coordination overhead. This talk details a real-world production incident at Flipkart where a critical dis… more
2 comments
Submitted
29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
Incremental computations repeatedly evaluate a function on some input values that are “changing”. The goal of an efficient implementation is to “reuse” previously computed results: when presented with a new change to the input, an incremental computation should only perform work proportional to the size of the changes of the input, rather than to the size of the entire dataset. more
1 comment
Submitted
29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Abstract: Modern RAG applications are easy to prototype but notoriously hard to productionize. With AI agents making code generation cheap, the real challenge has shifted to understanding what breaks under real workloads—filtered retrieval, selective predicates, joins, security, live data, and unpredictable latency. This workshop aims at equipping developers with the architectural intuition neede… more
1 comment
Submitted
29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: Hands-on workshops - where participants follow instructors on their laptops
Description Multi-region database deployments are usually motivated by resilience, but resilience is only part of the story. Teams also need to control where data lives (for compliance and data residency), keep read latency low even during failover, and avoid the situation where a well-intentioned rebalancing decision silently turns a local query into a cross-region one. The challenge is that the… more
1 comment
Submitted
29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
With YugabyteDB, the answer is roughly three seconds, and no data is lost. But that answer comes with a lot of engineering underneath it. Tablets. Raft consensus. Quorum writes. Leader elections. Fault domains. None of these is magic; they’re deliberate design decisions with real trade-offs, and understanding them is the difference between an on-call engineer who panics and one who knows exactly … more
1 comment
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Description Running a handful of PostgreSQL instances on Kubernetes is a solved problem — the CloudNativePG operator handles it elegantly. Running ten thousand of them on bare metal — with sub-5-minute provisioning, automated failover, and 99.99% availability — is where every comfortable assumption breaks down. Operator reconciliation loops behave differently at fleet scale, storage latency becom… more
2 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Description You run a database control plane that manages PostgreSQL clusters across dozens of remote Kubernetes environments. You need your internal state to reflect reality — which pods are running, which clusters are healthy, which replicas just failed over. The naive approach is obvious: poll every cluster’s API server every 30 seconds and diff the result against your metadata store. We proto… more
2 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
Category: Operations & Reliability Abstract A database migration is supposed to have a plan, a cutover window, and a rollback option. Ours had none of those luxuries. InMobi’s DSP platform runs real-time ad auctions — 3M bid requests per second, each needing a sub-100ms response. Taking Aerospike down, even briefly, means missed auctions and direct revenue loss. So when we decided to move our ent… more
3 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Category: War Stories & Lessons Learned Abstract When your database is in the critical path of every ad auction, failure isn’t abstract. A misconfigured cluster costs you money in real time. A CPU spike at 1AM means your bidder is throttling while your competitors are not. more
2 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Description We sized the storage layer for Nutanix’s Panacea.AI platform — 5 TB and 5 billion log lines a day — three different ways and got three answers an order of magnitude apart. Same workload, same retention, same ingest rate; the engines disagreed on storage by 37× and on CPU by 3×. more
2 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
Description There are real advantages to building a specialized database: better performance, less impedance mismatch, and lower operational cost. But the conventional wisdom against rolling your own exists for a reason. ACID is hard, and general-purpose systems are reliable precisely because they’ve been battle-hardened over decades. That calculus has recently changed - cheap object storage and … more
2 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Abstract Cloud-native databases like Cosmos DB promise elastic scalability, but in practice, throughput management often becomes a manual, reactive, and error-prone process. Teams tend to overprovision to avoid throttling—leading to wasted cost—or underprovision and risk latency spikes and SLA violations. This talk presents a proactive autoscaling system for Cosmos DB that eliminates this trade-o… more
2 comments
Submitted
30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
