by Indrajit Roy and Ippokratis Pandis
We are headed to VLDB 2026 to share multiple innovations that power the Databricks platform. Databricks Co-founder and Chief Architect, Reynold Xin, will kick-off the conference with the opening keynote. Databricks has four accepted papers related to Lakebase, Spark Structured Streaming, and automatic Lakehouse optimizations. The demo paper on the Enzyme engine will showcase how we incrementally maintain materialized views. Below is a preview of these presentations.
Keynote: The Three Golden Ages of Database Engineering
Databricks Co-Founder Reynold Xin will discuss how AI agents are ushering in the "third golden age" of database engineering. Some of you may remember his early 2012 work at Berkeley on the scalable analytical system called Shark. Reynold will reflect on how his own perspective on database technology has evolved over the years from his Berkeley days, through the rise of Lakehouse architecture, and now the changing demands on transactional and analytics engines. He will introduce two new paradigms that will help meet the needs of AI agents: (1) Lakebase, which applies storage and compute separation to OLTP database, and (2) LTAP (Lake Transactional Analytical Processing) which unifies transactional and analytical processing.
