We were told to scale compute. But what if the real problem was never about big data, but about bad data access? In this talk, we’ll unpack two powerful, often misunderstood techniques—projection pushdown and predicate pushdown—and why they matter more than ever in a world where we want lightweight, fast queries over large datasets. These optimizations aren’t just academic—they’re the difference between querying a terabyte in seconds vs. minutes. We’ll show how systems like Flink and DuckDB leverage these techniques, what limits them (hello, Protobuf), and how smart schema and storage design—especially in formats like Iceberg and Arrow can unlock dramatic speed gains. Along the way, we’ll highlight the importance of landing data in queryable formats, and why indexing and query engines matter just as much as compute. This talk is for anyone who wants to stop fully scanning their data lakes just to read one field.

The lakehouse promised to unify our data, but popular formats can feel bloated and hard to use for most real-world workloads. If you've ever felt that the complexity and operational overhead of "Big Data" tools are overkill, you're not alone. What if your lakehouse could be simple, fast, and maybe even a little fun? Enter DuckLake , the native lakehouse format, managed on MotherDuck. It delivers the powerful features you need like ACID transactions, time travel, and schema evolution without the heavyweight baggage. This approach truly makes massive data sets feel like Small Data. This workshop is a practical, step-by-step walkthrough for the data practitioner. We'll get straight to the point and show you how to build a fully functional, serverless lakehouse from scratch. You will learn: The Architecture: We’ll explore how DuckLake's design choices make it fundamentally simpler and faster for analytical queries compared to its JVM-based cousins. The Workflow: Through hands-on examples, you'll create a DuckLake table, perform atomic updates, and use time travel—all with the simple SQL you already know. The MotherDuck Advantage: Discover how the serverless platform makes it easy to manage, share, and query your DuckLake tables, enabling a seamless hybrid workflow between your laptop and the cloud.