We’re excited to be back at Big Data LDN this year—huge thanks to the organisers for hosting Databricks London once more!

Join us for an evening of insights, networking, and community with the Databricks Team and Advancing Analytics!

🎤 Agenda:

6:00 PM – 6:10 PM | Kickoff & Warm Welcome

Grab a drink, say hi, and get the lowdown on what’s coming up. We’ll set the scene for an evening of learning and laughs.

6:10 PM – 6:50 PM | The Metadata Marathon: How three projects are racing forward – Holly Smith (Staff Developer Advocate, Databricks)

With the enormous amount of discussion about open storage formats between nerds and even not-nerds, it can be hard to keep track of who’s doing what and how this actually makes any impact on day to day data projects.

Holly will take a closer look at the three big projects in this space; Delta, Hudi and Iceberg. They’re all trying to solve for similar data problems and have tackled the various challenges in different ways. Her talk will start with the very basics of how we got here, what the history is before diving deep into the underlying tech, their roadmaps, and their impacts on the data landscape as a whole.

6:50 PM – 7:10 PM | What’s New in Databricks & Databricks AI – Simon Whiteley & Gavi Regunath

Hot off the press! Simon and Gavi will walk you through the latest and greatest from Databricks, including shiny new AI features and platform updates you’ll want to try ASAP.

7:10 PM onwards | Q&A Panel + Networking

Your chance to ask the experts anything—then stick around for drinks, snacks, and some good old-fashioned data geekery.

Get fresh AI updates, expert insights on open formats, and network with the brightest minds in data - all in one evening.

Picture the scene — you're exploring a deep, dark cave looking for insights to unearth when, in a burst of smoke, Genie appears and offers you not three but unlimited data wishes. This isn't a folk tale, it's the growing wave of Generative BI that is going to be a part of analytics platforms. Databricks Genie is a tool powered by a SQL-writing LLM that redefines how we interact with data. We'll look at the basics of creating a new Genie room, scoping its data tables and asking questions. We'll help it out with some complex pre-defined questions and ensure it has the best chance of success. We'll give the tool a personality, set some behavioural guidelines and prepare some hidden easter eggs for our users to discover. Generative BI is going to be a fundamental part of the analytics toolset used across businesses. If you're using Databricks, you should be aware of Genie, if you're not, you should be planning your Generative BI Roadmap, and this session will answer your wishes.

Details to be confirmed soon

Accurate, reliable, and timely data is critical for CPG companies to stay ahead in highly competitive retailer relationships, and for a company like the Hershey Company, the commercial relationship with Walmart is one of the most important. The team at Hershey found themselves with a looming deadline for their legacy analytics services and targeted a migration to the brand new Walmart Luminate API. Working in partnership with Advancing Analytics, the Hershey Company leveraged a metadata-driven Lakehouse Architecture to rapidly onboard the new Luminate API, helping the category management teams to overhaul how they measure, predict, and plan their business operations.

In this session, we will discuss the impact Luminate has had on Hershey's business covering key areas such as sales, supply chain, and retail field execution, and the technical building blocks that can be used to rapidly provision business users with the data they need, when they need it. We will discuss how key technologies enable this rapid approach, with Databricks Autoloader ingesting and shaping our data, Delta Streaming processing the data through the lakehouse and Databricks SQL providing a responsive serving layer. The session will include commentary as well as cover the technical journey.

Talk by: Simon Whiteley and Jordan Donmoyer

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Simon and Denny have been discussing and debating all things Delta, Lakehouse and Apache Spark™ on their regular webshow. Whether you want advice on lake structures, want to hear their opinions on the latest trends and hype in the data world, or you simply have a tech implementation question to throw at two seasoned experts, these two will have something to say on the matter. In their previous shows, Simon and Denny focused on building out a sample lakehouse architecture, refactoring and tinkering as new features came out, but now we're throwing the doors open for any and every question you might have.

So if you've had a persistent question and think these two can help, this is the session for you. There will be a question submission form shared prior to the event, so the team will be prepped with a whole bunch of topics to talk through. Simon and Denny want to hear your questions, which they can field drawing from a wealth of industry experience, wide ranging community engagement and their differing perspectives as external consultant and internal Databricks respectively. There's also a chance they'll get distracted and go way off track talking about coffee, sci-fi, nerdery or the English weather. It happens.

Talk by: Simon Whiteley and Denny Lee

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Hear from two guests. First, Simon Whiteley (co-owner, Advancing Analytics) on his reaction to industry announcements, where he sees the industry heading, and an introduction to his community at Advancing Analytics. Second guest, Matteo Quattrocchi (Director - Policy, EMEA at BSA | The Software Alliance) on the current state of AI policies - by international governments, global committees, and individual companies.. Hosted by Ari Kaplan (Head of Evangelism, Databricks) and Pearl Ubaru (Sr Technical Marketing Engineer, Databricks)

Simon and Denny Build A Thing is a live webshow, where Simon Whiteley (Advancing Analytics) and Denny Lee (Databricks) are building out a TV Ratings Analytics tool, working through the various challenges of building out a Data Lakehouse using Databricks. In this session, they'll be talking through their Lakehouse Platform, revisiting various pieces of functionality, and answering your questions, Live!

This is your chance to ask questions around structuring a lake for enterprise data analytics, the various ways we can use Delta Live Tables to simplify ETL or how to get started serving out data using Databricks SQL. We have a whole load of things to talk through, but we want to hear YOUR questions, which we can field from industry experience, community engagement and internal Databricks direction. There's also a chance we'll get distracted and talk about the Expanse for far too long.

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc/