DISCUSSION: Boston Datafusion Meetup September 2026

[PratibhaRana-DD]

I wanted to start a discussion around the idea of hosting a DataFusion meetup in Boston this September.

@alamb pointed out that there’s a potential opportunity to align this with VLDB 2026, which will be taking place in Boston from August 31 to September 4. Since many folks in the data systems community will already be in town, this could be a great chance to get contributors and users together in person.

Some initial thoughts:

Location: DataDog Boston, MA
Tentative Date: Sept 4 ( towards the end of the conference so might be lighter on the agenda in the evening)
Goal: Bring together DataFusion users, contributors, and anyone interested in the project

Before moving forward, it would be great to get a sense of interest and availability from the community.

Would you be interested in attending and possibly presenting?
If you're planning to be at VLDB, would you stay for (or make time for) a DataFusion meetup?
Any preferences on format, topics, or timing?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

[alamb]

Thank you @PratibhaRana-DD for starting this discussion and for offering to host.

I think Sep 4 is a Friday and therefore may be somewhat lightly attended

I think the way VLDB is normally structured, for example from 2025 https://vldb.org/2025/?program-structure, the main program is Tue - Thur, with a big dinner / evening event on Wed. Friday has workshops, but also many people travel home that day

Therefore we may want to consider Thur Sep 3 as a date

I'll also post this discussion into slack/discord and on the mailing list to see if we can get some other feedbacl

[alamb]

Also I would be more than happy to present, but I would like to do something that is not "intro to DataFusion" 😆 as I have done that many times before. Maybe someone else could do the intro talk too

[NGA-TRAN]

I would be available on Thursday, September 3rd.
I would be happy to present on how Datadog uses Apache DataFusion to scale analytical queries in a nearly linear fashion.

[gene-bordegaray]

The 3rd works for me as well, looking forward to