Rootconf Topical Edition on Databases

A practitioner-focused edition on modern database systems — bringing production engineers and database researchers together to examine how data systems are actually designed, scaled, tested, and operated: from transactional databases and control planes to query engines, distributed correctness, and AI-era workloads.

12 & 13 June 2026 | Bengaluru

• Workshops on 12 June · Sahaj Software, Koramangala
• Conference on 13 June · TERI Auditorium, Indiranagar
• Additional workshop on 27 June

Schedule

The full schedule is now live. View schedule → https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/topical-edition-on-databases/schedule

Track 1 - Spotlight talks

No stats, no problem: building feedback-driven optimizers for lakehouses
Modern query optimizers assume good statistics. In lakehouse environments, that assumption breaks down. This talk covers practical techniques for planning under limited statistics - LEO-style learning, equivalence sets, auto-stats via sensitivity analysis — and a research direction on online parametric optimization for recurring BI workloads.

What breaks when Aerospike hits 6 million QPS
How extreme throughput exposes hidden bottlenecks — from kernel limits to network saturation — and why observability and chaos testing are critical at scale.

Fast on paper, slow in reality
Practical strategies for reducing transactional latency by safely bypassing the 2PC tax, while preventing OOM errors and latency spikes during large-scale range queries and high-throughput workloads.

Track 2 - Conference Room

A second track runs alongside the main programme in the Conference Room at TERI, featuring a fireside chat, a short paper presentation from SIGMOD, a Birds of Feather session, and flash talks.

The evolving OLAP stack: a conversation with Firebolt

Simon Stieger (Firebolt) in conversation with Anirudh Sudhir (Bengaluru Systems)
Agentic workloads are changing what we ask of analytical databases. This fireside chat explores how the OLAP space is evolving — and what it takes to build for what’s coming next.

Compaction is not a database-wide decision (Short paper presentation, SIGMOD 2026)

Suchitra Shankar and Nilin Rose, Computer Science students
Modern LSM-tree storage engines force a global choice between tiered and leveled compaction — optimising for either write throughput or read performance, but rarely both. Amethyst explores a different approach: treating compaction as a local rather than global decision, using lightweight metadata to dynamically select strategies at the segment level. This talk covers the trade-offs that motivated the design, the challenges of workload characterisation, and what benchmarking adaptive compaction reveals about the future of self-tuning storage engines.

Birds of a Feather: Rethinking data systems for the age of LLMs

Moderated by Varuni HK (Couchbase)
LLM invocations are becoming the dominant cost in data workflows — reshaping optimisation priorities across the stack. Databases are no longer passive stores but active participants in reasoning loops. This session brings practitioners and researchers together to examine what’s actually changing: how teams are optimising LLM-heavy workloads, what vectorisation decisions mean for system design, and the open challenges around benchmarking, reliability, and stateful workflows.

Flash talks — show and tell

Got something to share? Flash talks are open to all attendees — 5 minutes to show something you’ve built, a problem you’ve hit, or an idea worth putting in the room. Sign up on the day.

Keynote

Database Systems: A Decade of Disruption and Innovation
Karthik Ramachandra, Azure SQL, Microsoft

Over the last decade, databases evolved from tightly controlled on-prem systems into elastic, cloud-native services at planetary scale. This keynote traces the systems innovations that enabled that shift — large-scale query processing, cloud-native architectures, multi-modal workloads, governance, and distributed data management — and looks at what comes next in the AI era.

Workshops

Many of us use databases daily but rarely look under the hood. These workshops are built by engineers who work deeply on SQL and NoSQL internals — covering read and write paths, storage engines, and query execution. Workshops on 12 June are at Cafe Euphoria, 6th Block, Koramangala.

Workshop 1: Write path in OLTP workloads (PostgreSQL)

12 June · 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM

Covers how PostgreSQL ensures durability via WAL, performance trade-offs with background writer and checkpointer, concurrency control through MVCC, replication slots and streaming replication, and operational lessons from managing Postgres clusters in production.

Amit Prabhudesai is a member of the Rootconf community, and is Tech Lead on the Azure DocumentDB team at Microsoft with deep expertise in Postgres internals.

Register → https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/oltp-workloads-postgresql-workshop/

Workshop 2: Build a SQL query engine from scratch

12 June · 1:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Covers the building blocks of a SQL query engine — schema validation, logical vs. physical operators, optimizers, expression folding, and execution strategies — with hands-on work using open source database internals.

Aayush Naik and Samyak Sarnayak work on the query engine team at e6data. They have contributed to both the Java-based engine built from scratch and the newer Rust-based engine on Apache DataFusion.

Register → https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/build-a-sql-query-engine-from-scratch-workshop/

Workshop 3: Build a Toy LSM Tree from Scratch

27 June · 1:30 PM - 5:30 PM

A hands-on ~4-hour workshop implementing a simple Log Structured Merge (LSM) Tree in Go. Covers the write path and flushing to SSTable format, compaction strategies, tombstone handling, checkpointing, and tiered compaction.

Anirudh Rowjee is a Software Engineer working on Magma, an LSM Tree-based storage engine at Couchbase.

Register → https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/build-a-toy-lsm-tree-from-scratch-workshop/

Diversity Grants

The Rootconf Topical Edition on Databases is offering diversity grants for women participants. FOSS United Foundation has provided initial support.

Applications have now closed. The applicants’ pool this year has been strong - contributors and mentees from GSoC, LFX, and CNCF, many navigating this space from tier 2 and tier 3 cities with limited local mentorship.

We are finalizing the shortlist and request your support as many deserving candidates as possible. If your organization is keen to sponsor additional grant slots, reach out to Hasgeek on 7676332020 or info@hasgeek.com

Editorial team

Curated by practitioners building and operating large-scale data systems.

Editor: Sandeep Joshi (Uber)
Workshop curator: Ranganadh Thatha (Mico)

Reviewers:
Anirudh Rowjee (Couchbase) · Varuni HK (Couchbase) · Kumar Abhijeet (Index Exchange) · Rajkumar Iyer (Microsoft) · Siddhartha Reddy (Udaan) · Raj Suvariya (Stripe) · Rolland Santimano (Rubrik) · Rohan Reddy Alleti (Sahaj) · Mohit Gurnani (Nutanix) · Varun Mishra (Flipkart) · Talina Shrotiya (Couchbase) · Abdul Samad (Flipkart)

Attend

🎟 Conference tickets and annual memberships

Conference ticket

• Cancel any time up to 24 hours before the event. Full refund, no questions asked.
• Includes access to all Rootconf activities — workshops, meetups, and conferences — for one year.
• Easier to get reimbursed through company/HR.

Annual membership

• Access to all Rootconf activities — workshops, meetups, and conferences — for one year.
• No cancellation.

Sponsors

• Firebolt is an open-source analytical database built for real-time operations, with an open table format and full PostgreSQL compatibility. The team from Firebolt will be at Rootconf to talk to engineers who will use and shape analytical databases; they want direct feedback from practitioners.
  "On 13 June, Simon Stieger from Firebolt will be in conversation with Anirudh Sudhir (Bengaluru Systems) in Track 2 — a fireside chat on how the OLAP stack is evolving for agentic workloads."There will also be a booth where engineers can engage with the Firebolt team and try out demos.

• Thank you to the FOSS United Foundation for supporting the diversity grants programme.

Sponsorship inquiries

Write to sales@hasgeek.com

Contact

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