A week at Dagstuhl on robust queries and stream processing

I spent last week at Schloss Dagstuhl for Seminar 26311: Robust Database Queries and Stream Processing: From Ingest to Insights.

It is a rare and useful format. Database people from industry and academia sit in the same rooms for a week, pick hard problems, and actually work on them — then take the work home. That continuation is the point. The week is a start, not a conference recap.

I joined a small group on log-structured merging for transacted tables and indexes. The system is useful and genuinely hard. I plan to use AI agents both to help build it and to create simulations I can run myself — to understand the design more clearly, and to share those simulations with others.

I also suspect this line of work will shape how I think about a scaling transactional catalog for a very large analytic database in the AI era.

I am excited about both. I will write a series of posts as the implementation and the simulations take shape.