Data Internals – Blow Your Mind

Dive deep into the hidden workings of data systems. This track reveals the inner mechanics of databases, engines, storage, optimisation, and processing at a level that will bend your brain.

This track is for those who want to go beyond surface-level behaviour and into how data systems actually work. It focuses on the internal mechanics that drive performance, reliability, and scalability — the parts you only really appreciate once systems are under real pressure.

Sessions dive deep into databases, query engines, storage layers, optimisation strategies, and processing models. You’ll explore how these components interact under real workloads, how design decisions surface as performance characteristics, and why some problems only appear at scale.

Are you:

analysing query plans, operators, and execution strategies to understand performance?
working with storage engines, transaction logs, and memory management?
tuning concurrency, parallelism, and resource governance?
investigating cache behaviour, I/O patterns, and contention?
interested in how optimisers make trade-offs under different workloads?

These sessions are unapologetically deep and technical, aimed at people who want to reason about data systems from first principles and push their understanding of internals further.