Fifth Elephant 2026

I recently attended The Fifth Elephant conference on 31st July 2026, it was an interesting experience overall, I got to learn a lot of things, and also had a fanboy moment! Read on for the whole scoop :). Speaker to attendee Hasgeek had reached out to my $WORK for submitting a talk to the conference and I had gladly volunteered! Topic was already decided, it had to be about Composable Query Engines. Basically covering all the rave about datafusion, arrow, etc. Projects of this new era which are allowing everyone to build their own versions of specialised databases with shared infrastructure easily. Historically, it has been hard to introduce proper abstractions in databases. Abstractions which respect the performance and provide extensibility at the same time followed a super delicate balance. Andrew Lamb took on this challenge and has developed a remarkable project. By the way, this is just about the query engine. Similar credit goes to arrow and other awesome projects which are…