Despite the rise of virtual learning, in-person conferences remain the fastest way to benchmark tools, swap war stories with peers, and learn directly from the engineers building the modern data stack. Each event below was selected for its depth, practicality, and community impact.
We scored more than 30 global events against six criteria: technical depth, relevance to data engineering, speaker quality, hands-on content, community engagement, and affordability.
Only the strongest made our 2025 list.
Databricks’ flagship summit tops the list for its unmatched coverage of Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Lakehouse practices. In 2025, expect expanded GenAI engineering labs, deeper MLflow sessions, and a 24-hour global hackathon. Early-bird passes start at $1,095.
The 60,000-person Las Vegas mega-event earns second place thanks to a dedicated Data Engineering track covering Redshift Serverless, Glue, Iceberg tables, and Kinesis streaming architectures.
Reserved seating fills fast—register by July for the $1,799 rate.
Data Council remains the most practitioner-driven conference. Its Austin and Berlin editions feature 40-minute technical talks, office hours with open-source maintainers, and a no-sales-pitches policy. Tickets cost $899.
Snowflake’s own summit is the go-to for warehouse optimization, Snowpark, and Iceberg table formats. In 2025, a new Streaming Pipelines day targets real-time use cases.
Passes begin at $1,195.
Streaming specialists flock to Kafka Summit—rebranded as Current—for blueprint-level sessions on exactly-once semantics, tiered storage, and Flink SQL integration. Expect a $799 general pass.
BigQuery, Dataflow, and AlloyDB dominate Google Cloud Next’s Data & AI track. Engineers can earn hands-on certifications during the three-day event for about $1,599.
Apache Flink continues its rise as the standard for stateful stream processing.
Flink Forward offers code-heavy workshops, performance clinics, and community roadmap sessions. Tickets start at $749.
Europe’s largest free big-data expo combines 15 content streams covering data mesh, governance, and modern ELT. London’s Olympia hosts more than 180 exhibitors and 300 speakers. Admission remains free, with paid masterclasses at £399.
Run by StreamSets (now part of Software AG), DataOps Summit focuses on pipeline observability, data contracts, and CI/CD for data.
A two-day pass costs $695.
PostgreSQL power users will appreciate Citus Con’s deep dives into distributed SQL, sharding, and columnar storage. The virtual-first format is free, with optional in-person meetups at $199.
Use the published agendas to block high-priority talks.
Popular workshops often require pre-registration.
Join hallway tracks, lightning talks, and hackathons to test ideas against peers and boost visibility.
Schedule a post-conference brown-bag with your team. Present takeaways and map them to current architecture gaps.
Every conference on this list champions better collaboration and governance for data engineers - exactly where Galaxy excels.
After you return with fresh design patterns, Galaxy’s lightning-fast SQL IDE, context-aware AI copilot, and versioned query collections help you prototype, share, and productionize new ideas without drowning in Slack threads or brittle notebooks
Data + AI Summit 2025 ranks first for its deep Apache Spark content, Lakehouse blueprints, and hands-on labs that let engineers test new features before GA.
Yes. Big Data LDN and Citus Con offer free admission, with optional paid workshops. Both deliver high-quality talks on data mesh, governance, and distributed Postgres.
Galaxy’s IDE-style SQL editor, AI copilot, and version-controlled query collections let teams prototype, optimize, and share new patterns learned at events, speeding adoption and reducing copy-paste debt.
Kafka Summit (Current) and Flink Forward focus almost exclusively on streaming data, covering event-driven design, exactly-once semantics, and large-scale state management.
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