Special Edition on Databases

What is this special edition about?

A special Rootconf edition on databases, co-located with the ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference 2026 — bringing practitioners and researchers into the same room to examine how modern data systems are actually designed, scaled, and run in production.
With SIGMOD/PODS bringing global database researchers to Bengaluru, this edition creates a rare opportunity to connect research ideas with production systems.
Curated by Sandeep Joshi (Uber) with reviewers from Couchbase, Microsoft, Stripe, and more.

Tracks

• Exploratory/survey -- cut through the noise with talks that unpack emerging database ideas, architectures, and research, helping you build a clear mental model of where the ecosystem is heading.
• Production-informed learnings -- what worked, what failed, and why. Real-world lessons from running databases in production, including failures, bottlenecks, performance trade-offs, and hard-earned decisions.

Highlights

1. Mihai Budiu (Chief Scientist, Feldera) -- Rethinking incremental computation
   A deep dive into Incremental View Maintenance (IVM)—one of the hardest problems in databases—and how a set of simple ideas can solve it for arbitrary SQL queries (including recursive ones). See how Feldera applies these ideas in practice to deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements in query latency and compute efficiency over traditional batch systems.
2. Arpit Bhayani (Principal Engineer, Razorpay) -- Why databases were not designed for agents
   Modern databases assume predictable queries, short-lived connections, and human-readable schemas. Agentic systems break all of these. Arpit Bhayani unpacks what changes when LLMs start interacting with your data layer—and shares concrete patterns (idempotency keys, append-only logs, per-agent roles) to make your systems resilient.
3. Sarthak Makhija (Principal Architect, Caizin) -- Fast on paper, slow in reality
   A candid post-mortem on building a distributed key-value store: why designs that were “correct” failed under production pressure. Sarthak Makhija breaks down bottlenecks like 2PC overhead, lock contention, and redundant I/O—and shows how to rethink systems for real-world performance.

This lineup brings together research breakthroughs, production failures, and next-gen workloads — the full spectrum of how modern databases are evolving in practice.

Submissions are already in from teams at Yugabyte, CockroachDB, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Antithesis, InMobi, Razorpay, Nutanix, and Teradata.
Explore what’s coming: https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/database-conf-cfp/sub

Editorial team

Talks are reviewed and selected by an editorial team of practitioners building and operating large-scale data systems.

Editor

Sandeep Joshi (ex-Amazon, ex-Nutanix, ex-Kognitos); Editor of Data Engineering and Infrastructure track at The Fifth Elephant.

Reviewers

• Anirudh Rowjee (Couchbase)
• Varuni HK (Couchbase)
• Kumar Abhijeet (Index Exchange)
• Ranganadh Thatha (Mico)
• Rajkumar Iyer (Microsoft, SQL team)
• Siddhartha Reddy (Udaan)
• Raj Suvariya (Stripe)
• Rolland Santimano (Rubrik)
• Rohan Reddy Alleti (Sahaj)

The agenda

📅 Friday, 29 May
Hands-on workshops, followed by a mixer and informal social activities — hosted across venues in Whitefield and Bengaluru.

📅 Saturday, 30 May
Conference at Polaris School of Technology, Brookfield.
If you’re attending the ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference 2026, you’re practically in the Rootconf neighbourhood.

Who is this Rootconf special edition for?

You should attend if you:

• Build or operate databases, data platforms, or large-scale data pipelines
• Care about performance, reliability, and correctness in data systems
• Want to understand how ideas from research (e.g., SIGMOD) show up in production
• Have faced (or want to avoid) real-world issues like scaling bottlenecks, query inefficiencies, or data failures

Why attend?

This is where you sharpen how you think about databases in the real world:

1. Learn from production, not just theory
   Hear directly from practitioners about what actually worked, what failed, and the trade-offs behind real systems.
2. Build a strong peer network
   Connect with engineers, architects, and researchers working on similar problems — the kind of conversations that outlast the event.
3. Find your community
   Become part of a group that continues to exchange ideas, share learnings, and collaborate well beyond the conference.

How to attend

🎟 Ticket
All-access pass to the workshops (29 May) and conference (30 May), with the option to attend in person or remotely.
Note: Food is not included for in-person attendees — please add a food ticket.

🤝 Annual membership
One-year access to Rootconf events and community activities across India. Attend sessions in person or online — plus recordings of all sessions, so you never miss out.
Note: Members attending in person will need to purchase a food ticket separately.

🍽 Food ticket
For in-person attendees, the food ticket includes tea/coffee with morning snacks, lunch, and evening tea — so you can stay fuelled and keep the conversations going through the day.

👕 T-shirt
We loved the fine-grain fabric from The Layer Project and have partnered with them to create Rootconf tees.
Own one — you won’t regret it. Add it to your cart.

Contact information

📞 Call or WhatsApp Rootconf: +91 76763 32020
📧 Email: info@hasgeek.com

Sponsorship inquiries

Interested in placing your brand before a niche audience of technologists? Reach out to sales@hasgeek.com