Berlin Buzzwords 2026

Over a decade ago, Martin Kleppmann’s Turning the Database Inside Out challenged us to rethink data systems from first principles—placing the event stream at the center of storage, computation, and truth. That vision sparked an entire ecosystem of event-driven architectures, real-time analytics systems, and stream-aware databases.

But what if that journey is still unfinished?

This talk explores the next leap: reimagining the database itself through the lens of streaming. Instead of treating the event log as a narrow integration pipe, we’ll treat it as the core substrate for all data—augmented with the essential primitives that traditional databases provide: long-term storage, indexing, and rich materializations. To get there, we move beyond simple append/consume patterns and embrace modern table formats and storage layers capable of making event data durable, queryable, and universally accessible.

The result is an architecture that collapses fragile pipelines, dissolves the boundary between real-time and historical processing, and provides a unified view of the world using widely adopted open standards (Apache Kafka and Apache Iceberg) This changes the question from “what’s happening right now?” to “what has happened across the entire lifespan of the system?”.

You’ll walk away seeing both the database—and the stream—through a fundamentally new lens.