Robert Hodges
CEO at Altinity
Robert Hodges serves as CEO at Altinity, an enterprise provider for ClickHouse. Robert has over 30 years of experience with database systems and applications including pre-relational databases such as M204, online SQL transaction processing, Hadoop, and analytics. In the last few years, his work has focused on analytical databases, Kubernetes, and open source. Robert is the founder of the Open Source Analytics Conference (osacon.io).
Talks
Data Con LA 2025
What's a Data Lake and What Does It Mean For My Open Source Stack?
Data lakes on open table formats like Iceberg are a popular way to manage large datasets for analytics, data science, and AI. This talk explains how data lakes work and how to adapt open source analytic stacks to use them. First, we'll tour projects like Arrow, Iceberg, and Unity Catalog that make data lakes possible. Next, we'll see how analytic engines like DuckDB, ClickHouse, and Spark are adapting. Finally, we'll survey a few projects that enable applications written in Python, Golang, or Rust to deliver fast queries. You'll have to build the app yourself, but this talk will show you a path to use data lakes and open source successfully.
Data Con LA 2023
Kubernetes + Data + Security: Tips for Sleeping Well with State-of-the-Art Data Management
Kubernetes is the default platform to operator data services. But how to protect your data? Our talk shows that threats to data on Kubernetes arise at different levels and introduces common sense ways to address each threat that any dev can apply using modern development toolchains. Attend our talk and sleep well at night!
https://youtu.be/Sb_34c5f_so?si=u3uNJO2w77k60nsiData Con LA 2020
Data warehouse or conventional database: Which is right for you?