That’s a Wrap! Highlights from Subsurface LIVE Winter 2022

That’s a wrap on Subsurface LIVE Winter 2022! 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 people behind the scenes which make this event possible. 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 by attendance were about Apache Iceberg.
• 4 of the top 15 sessions by attendance were talks from organizations on how they architected their data platform with a data lake-based foundation.
• 3,726 companies were represented across a global audience
• 111 breakout talk submissions. With all the quality submissions, we added two more breakout tracks than last Subsurface, but we were still only able to accept 30% of the submissions. 

Even after adding two additional breakout tracks, we still had so many great submissions that we weren't able to fit into the live event. So, we decided to hold a series of Subsurface meetups throughout the year so we can share all this valuable content with the community. See the meetups section below for more information.

Three Major Announcements

In addition to the amazing breakout sessions, we were incredibly excited to share three major Dremio announcements during Dremio Founder and CPO Tomer Shiran’s keynote:

• Dremio Sonar, a lakehouse query engine, is now GA on Dremio Cloud
• Dremio Arctic, an intelligent metastore for Apache Iceberg, is now out of stealth mode and is in public preview on Dremio Cloud
• Robust Forever-Free editions for both of these products available through the Dremio Cloud platform - with no time, scale, or credit limits

Breakout Session Highlights

Here are some of our favorite breakout sessions from Subsurface LIVE Winter 2022, in case you weren’t able to catch them all. 

• Anton Okolnychyi from Apple shared some best practices for which techniques to use for which use cases when tuning row-level operations using Apache Iceberg.
• Martijn Beenker shared 5 lessons learned in scaling Apache Airflow to the enterprise level, including managing IP address availability and database capacity.
• Philip Portnoy from Wayfair shared how they created a real-time hybrid cloud data streaming pipeline using Apache Beam and Google Cloud Platform.
• Tyler Axdorff and Rodrigo Nunes from Mercedes-Benz shared their hybrid-cloud data platform, which brings together AWS and Azure environments to foster efficient and easy data sharing and discovery

All breakout sessions from the conference are already available to view through the Subsurface Resource Library. We’ll publish the recordings, slide decks, and transcripts on the Subsurface community site on March 29.

Moving forward, Subsurface Live will be an annual event. Follow Subsurface on Twitter where we will announce the date soon - stay tuned!

Coming Soon: Subsurface Community Meetups

To continue sharing experiences and lessons learned between annual Subsurface LIVE events, we’ll be hosting Subsurface meetups throughout the year. This will give the community an opportunity to meet up with old friends and foster new relationships of like-minded individuals.

Based on community feedback, these will be in a hybrid format, with a virtual presentation combined with in-person get-togethers where you can watch the presentation, participate in Q&A, and socialize with your data peers with beer, wine, cocktails, or your beverage of choice. 

The first Subsurface Meetup will be on April 28 and there will be two talks: one from Asurion on their internal data lake and one on Apache Iceberg. Below you can find links to the virtual event and the watch party locations. Note the in-person meetups are capped at 40 people due to limited space, so be sure to sign up before we run out of spots.

• Virtual (Zoom)
• New York
• Chicago

Be sure to join our meetup group to be notified when we schedule additional virtual and in-person meetups!

Thanks and See You All Soon!

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