That’s a Wrap! Highlights from Subsurface LIVE 2023

That’s a wrap on Subsurface LIVE 2023! I personally had a blast meeting and hanging out with folks in person in San Francisco, and I know my colleagues did as well in New York and London - not to forget the folks attending virtually (all 7,096 of you!).

We were glad to see so many folks having fun and interacting with fellow attendees, speakers, and sponsors during the event. Thank you to the Subsurface community, speakers, attendees, sponsors, and the many people behind the scenes which made this event so successful. We had a blast putting it together for you all and we hope everyone enjoyed it!

Subsurface by the Numbers

Some stats from the event:

• The top 4 sessions and 7 of the top 10 by attendance were about Apache Iceberg. The top 4 were:
  • Scaling Row Level Deletions at Pinterest by Ashish Singh from Pinterest
  • Tame the Small Files Problem and Optimize Data Layout for Streaming Ingestion to Iceberg by Steven Wu and Gang Ye from Apple
  • Lakehouse Smart Iceberg Table Optimizer by Raj Konda and Steve Zhang from Apple
  • Managing Data Files In Apache Iceberg by Russell Spitzer from Apple
• 3 of the top 20 sessions by attendance were about Apache Arrow
• 4,560 companies were represented across a global audience
• 52 breakout sessions, 189 breakout talk submissions. With all the quality submissions, we decided to stretch it and add an additional breakout track, but we were still only able to accept 27% of the submissions. Thanks to all who submitted talks! We hope we can find you other speaking opportunities to share your stories.

Breakout Session Highlights

Here are a few of our favorite breakout sessions from Subsurface LIVE 2023, in case you weren’t able to catch them all. 

• Deniz Parmaksız from Insider shared how migrating to Apache Iceberg saved them 90% on their Amazon S3 cost
• Benn Stancil from Mode shared his thoughts on the muddy world of what being a “database” really means in 2023
• Raj Konda and Steve Zhang from Apple shared how they automate their Apache Iceberg optimizations using intelligent techniques, including that they’re going to open-source their automation framework so everyone can benefit from it
• Lenoy Jacob from Dremio shared how to architect Dremio Sonar to support thousands of concurrent queries
• Ashish Singh from Pinterest shared how they scale row-level deletes on Apache Iceberg into the petabyte-scale at Pinterest

Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide

I'm glad this cat's finally out of the bag - we're writing Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide with O'Reilly! We're really looking forward to providing a resource that can help data engineers, data architects, and anyone else who wants to, learn about Iceberg from soup to nuts. The early release is available now (chapter 1) and we're working hard on the rest of the book to make it available in the next 9-12 months.

Watch Any Sessions You Missed

All breakout sessions from the conference are already available to view through the conference platform. We’ll publish the recordings on YouTube within 2 weeks (hopefully sooner) as well as the slide decks and transcripts.

In-person Highlights

Here are a few pictures from the on-site locations:

Hope to see you again soon!

From all of us here helping put on Subsurface, thanks for coming and hope to see you all again soon!