Zoe Steinkamp — Developer Advocate at ClickHouse.

Talk by Zoe Steinkamp, Developer Advocate at ClickHouse.

Site Reliability Engineers spend countless hours diagnosing complex production issues and optimizing system performance. This talk explores how Large Language Models can augment SRE workflows with real-world examples.

We'll also demonstrate live tooling that leverages AI to optimize database configurations - automatically recommending ordering keys, generating materialized views, and suggesting performance improvements based on query patterns and system metrics.

Rather than theoretical possibilities, this talk focuses on practical implementations with measurable results. Attendees will learn actionable strategies for integrating LLMs into their SRE workflows, understand the current boundaries of AI effectiveness in operations, and see concrete examples of tooling already delivering value in production environments.

As organizations increasingly adopt data lake architectures, analytics databases face significant integration challenges beyond simple data ingestion. This talk explores the complex technical hurdles encountered when building robust connections between analytics engines and modern data lake formats.

We'll examine critical implementation challenges, including the absence of native library support for formats like Delta Lake, which necessitates expansion into new programming languages such as Rust to achieve optimal performance. The session explores the complexities of managing stateful systems, addressing caching inconsistencies, and reconciling state across distributed environments.

A key focus will be on integrating with external catalogs while maintaining data consistency and performance - a challenge that requires careful architectural decisions around metadata management and query optimization. We'll explore how these technical constraints impact system design and the trade-offs involved in different implementation approaches.

Attendees will gain a practical understanding of the engineering complexity behind seamless data lake integration and actionable approaches to common implementation obstacles.

En regardant certaines des premières pull requests dans le repository ClickHouse, vous verrez un fort accent mis sur l’intégration avec des systèmes externes. Au fil du temps, ClickHouse est devenu un puissant pont entre les data lakes et les data warehouses, prenant en charge les files d’attente, les bases de données et les object stores, avec une compatibilité pour plus de 60 formats d’entrée et de sortie. Cette polyvalence permet aux utilisateurs de bénéficier de la flexibilité d’un data lake tout en conservant les performances de requêtes en temps réel.

Dans cette session, nous discuterons de la manière dont nos utilisateurs exploitent ClickHouse et Iceberg, ainsi que de certaines fonctionnalités en cours de développement pour faciliter cette mouvance.

AI is no longer just a buzzword—it’s a fundamental part of our daily lives. Forward-thinking organizations are embracing AI technologies, not just to stay competitive but to drive innovation, agility, and efficiency. When building AI platforms, the ability to process vast amounts of data in real-time is crucial to deliver optimised performance. This talk explores how ultra-fast analytics databases are transforming the AI landscape by enabling scalable, high-performance data processing.