Submissions
Rootconf
Rootconf

Rootconf topical edition on Databases

Call for Proposals

Accepting submissions till 09 May 2026, 11:59 PM

Not accepting submissions

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

Theme

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.

Example topics include:

Database architectures

  • Object-store–backed databases
  • Disaggregated databases (compute–storage separation)
  • Lakehouse and hybrid architectures
  • HTAP systems (hybrid transactional/analytical processing)
  • Serverless or multi-tenant database systems

Performance and scalability

  • Query optimization and indexing strategies
  • Operating databases at extreme scale
  • Observability and performance debugging
  • Cost-aware query planning and workload optimization

AI and vector workloads

  • Vector databases and hybrid search architectures
  • Retrieval systems and embedding pipelines
  • AI-assisted query optimization
  • Integrating LLM applications with databases

Reliability and operations

  • Replication, failover, and disaster recovery
  • Incident postmortems and failure analysis
  • Schema evolution and safe migrations
  • Multi-region database operations

Security and governance

  • Fine-grained access control and row-level security
  • Data lineage, auditability, and compliance
  • Privacy-preserving database systems

War stories and lessons learned

  • 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.

Formats

We welcome submissions in multiple formats:

  • 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
  • 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
  • Lightning talk (5 minutes) – new ideas, experiments, or early work
  • Birds of Feather (BOF) proposals – discussion on focussed topics
  • Hands-on workshops - where participants follow instructors on their laptops

If you are presenting research at SIGMOD, consider submitting a practitioner-focused version of your work for the Rootconf audience.

What makes a strong submission

We look for submissions that clearly explain:

  • The problem you encountered
  • The system design or approach you adopted
  • Trade-offs and alternatives you evaluated
  • Lessons learned that others can apply

Real-world engineering stories and detailed technical insights are especially welcome.

Make a submission

Accepting submissions till 09 May 2026, 11:59 PM

Nitesh Vijay

What Happens When Your Embedding Model Changes and You Have 50 Million Vectors in Production

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
  • 3 comments
  • Submitted
  • 15 Mar 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Nitesh Vijay

Multi-Tenant Vector Search: The Indexing Nightmare Nobody Warned You About

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

Gautham Krithiwas

Hybrid Search with Couchbase

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
  • 4 comments
  • Submitted
  • 14 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Saravana S

Overcoming Management and Data Protection challenges of complex distributed databases - An Integrated approach

Introduction: Case Study: Managing and Protecting Distributed Databases - MongoDB Sharded Clusters more
  • 7 comments
  • Submitted
  • 23 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive
Anirudh Rowjee

Anirudh Rowjee

A Survey of LSM Trees backed by Object Storage

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

Krithika Subramanian

You Can’t Just Plug In a Vector Index!! - Making Vector Indexes Work in Relational Databases

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
  • 11 comments
  • Submitted
  • 27 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Tanzeel Khan

Compliance Without Compromise: Dynamic Data Masking in PostgreSQL

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

Mario Rozario

The Query That Ran for 47 Days. Then Didn't.

{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
  • 11 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience

Varun Mishra

Breaking the Linear Bottleneck: Re-Architecting HBase Backups

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
  • 7 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Kulwant Singh

Priyansh kimtee

Aniket

Building Enterprise‑Grade RAG Applications with SQL Server and Microsoft Fabric

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
  • 7 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: Hands-on workshops - where participants follow instructors on their laptops

Chandra T

From "Runs Across Regions" to "Works the Way You Intended": Building Multi-Region SQL Abstractions in CockroachDB

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
  • 2 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Akkireddy Gunta

Zero Downtime, Zero Excuses: How YugabyteDB Keeps Running When Everything Goes Wrong

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

Vasudev Jamwal

Zero Bids Dropped — Migrating Live Aerospike Clusters Across Clouds and Regions

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
  • 8 comments
  • Submitted
  • 30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Aditya Bhalla

Custom Autoscaler for using Azure Cosmos DB in a cost effective manner

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
  • 3 comments
  • Submitted
  • 30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience
Mallikarjun

Mallikarjun

Looking beyond what meets the eye -- DB Platform Engineer perspective

Database is an organised collection of structured data stored on one or more database servers. A distributed database is a single logical database that is spread across multiple database servers. Every production grade functional application which needs to persist its state durably needs a production grade database, in today’s world a distributed database. more
  • 4 comments
  • Submitted
  • 07 May 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Nimalan Mahadevan

When optimizations fail at scale - think outside the box

Summary At e6data, our query optimizer and operators are specialized for low-latency dashboard queries that scan terabytes of data. In this talk, we’ll look at two scenarios where our existing optimizations fell short, and how we came up with out-of-the-box ideas to target specific query patterns. more
  • 2 comments
  • Submitted
  • 09 May 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience

Sweta

No Stats, No Problem: : Building Feedback-Driven Optimizers for Lakehouses

Modern query optimizers were designed assuming that the engine has reasonably good statistics: row counts, NDVs, histograms, column correlations, table freshness, and reliable cost models. In many lakehouse environments, that assumption breaks down. This talk is about building a query optimizer that can survive in that world. We will discuss a set of practical techniques for planning under limite… more
  • 6 comments
  • Submitted
  • 09 May 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 30-minute talk – technical deep dive

Vaibhaw Pandey

Beyond Polling: Building an Event-Driven State Engine for Multi-Cluster Database Control Planes

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
  • 11 comments
  • Submitted
  • 30 Apr 2026
Session type - select the format for your session: 15-minute talk – focused engineering experience

Hosted by

Rootconf
Rootconf
We care about site reliability, cloud costs, security and data privacy