This October, we'll be hosting a meetup session at our new Berlin office! We'll be hearing from

Max Heimel, Principal Software Engineer at Snowflake

Taking a Peek Under the Hood of Snowflake's Query Performance Features

One of Snowflake's core architectural advantages is its ability to deliver high-performance analytics without sacrificing elasticity. Central to this is our separation of compute and storage: data lives in cloud storage, accessible by any compute node on demand, while transactional consistency is maintained through a centralized metadata service. This separation enables near-instant spin-up of compute resources, but it also means that reading data comes at a cost. To keep queries fast and efficient, we need to be smart about what data we bring onto the node and what we skip. That's where Snowflake's metadata system comes in: each micro-partition is richly annotated with statistics and summaries that let our engine quickly prune away irrelevant data before scanning even begins. In this talk, we'll take you on a deep dive into how Snowflake organizes data internally, how we use metadata to make intelligent pruning decisions, and how you can take advantage of features like clustering and search optimization to speed up your own workloads.

Tim Stemke, Data Architecture Specialist at Accenture

Inside Apache Iceberg: Architecture, Catalogs, and How Snowflake Brings It to Life

Tim will unpack the core design of Apache Iceberg, explain how metadata, manifests, and snapshots work together, and why catalogs play a critical role in managing table state. We’ll also look at Snowflake’s Horizon Catalog and Open Catalog, and dive into the key differences between Iceberg tables and native Snowflake tables, including performance, interoperability, and management trade-offs.

Date: Wednesday 22nd October

Time: 17:00 - 20:30

Location: Das Centre, Gebäude D2 - 2. Etage, Kemperplatz 1, Mitte D, 10785 Berlin, Deutschland