This list was updated on December 23, 2025 and represents my upcoming live speaking events such as at conferences, user groups/meetups, webinars, and training courses.
Upcoming events
Starburst Galaxy Demo (Webinar) — Jan 7, 2026
Join Lester Martin for a technical deep dive into Starburst Galaxy, a fully-managed data lake analytics platform designed for handling petabyte-scale data sets in and around your cloud data lake. Starburst experts will demo how you can easily discover, govern, analyze, and share data across clouds from a single platform in 20 minutes.
Apache Iceberg Meetup ATL: Iceberg v3, Apache Polaris, and more! (Meetup) — Jan 21, 2026
I’ll be 1 of the 3 presenters at this in-person even in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I’ll be talking about, and demoing Iceberg v3.
Starburst 101 Workshop: Build a Modern Data Lakehouse (Webinar) — Jan 21, 2026
Looking to transform raw data in your data lake into secure, curated datasets, also known as data products, that power downstream analytics and insights?
Join Lester Martin for a 90-minute, hands-on Starburst 101 workshop. You’ll learn the fundamentals of how Starburst and Trino work together to enable modern data architectures. After a brief overview, you’ll dive into a live, instructor-led lab where you’ll build a federated data pipeline within a data lakehouse environment.
In this workshop, you’ll use Starburst Galaxy, the fastest and easiest way to run Trino, along with Apache Iceberg, to create a secure, scalable lakehouse architecture similar to what leading companies like Arity, Citigroup, and Vectra AI are using today.
Optimizing Apache Iceberg Performance (Webinar) — Jan 27, 2026
Join Lester Martin for a practical, fast-paced session on improving query performance across your data lakehouse. While we focus on Apache Iceberg, the techniques apply broadly to Delta Lake and Apache Hive as well.
We’ll start with optimizations you can apply today as a table consumer: maintaining statistics, using effective filtering and projection, and leveraging caching to reduce latency.
Then we will go under the hood to show how your lakehouse tables should be structured and maintained to improve performance at scale, covering join optimization and file size considerations, as well as compaction, partitioning, bucketing, and file-level sorting.
From Trino to Starburst: The Architecture & Performance Advantages Explained (Webinar) — Feb 3, 2026
rino is a powerful open-source query engine, but many organizations need additional capabilities to operationalize it for governed, reliable analytics at scale. Addressing these foundational concerns enables organizations to ensure their AI strategies are built on trusted, secure data.
Starburst builds on Trino’s foundation and provides the governance, performance, and connectivity required for mission-critical workloads across clouds, regions, and data sources. Starburst integrates with popular AI models and services such as LLMs & MCP and includes its own AI agent that sits on top of our data products foundation.
In this session, we’ll walk through the architectural differences that matter most when teams move from open-source Trino to Starburst. You will see how Starburst improves performance, strengthens security and governance, expands connectivity, and simplifies day-to-day operations. Additionally, you will understand how AI services and features can be configured and governed just like data sources.
Starburst Office Hours: Connect Once, Query Everywhere (Webinar) — Feb 12, 2026
Join Starburst expert Lester Martin for a fast, practical Office Hours session on how to create a single point of access to all your data, across clouds, regions, and on-prem systems, without moving or copying anything.
In this fast, 20‑minute demo, we’ll cover:
- How to stand up a unified connection hub across cloud and on‑prem sources
- Explore various types of data sources, including data lakes, CDWs, RDBMSs, and NoSQL databases
- The benefit of a single point of access also enables a single point of governance
- How teams use this pattern to speed up insights without replatforming
We’ll leave plenty of time for live Q&A, so bring your questions about connecting data sources, federated joins, or your own architecture. Lester will walk through real examples based on what attendees want to explore.
Perfect for data engineers, platform teams, and architects looking to simplify access and deliver faster insights.
Starburst Workshop: Hands-On with Apache Iceberg – Build, Evolve, Operate (Webinar) — Feb 19, 2026
Get hands-on with Apache Iceberg in this introductory workshop. We’ll cover the full table lifecycle, from creating your first Iceberg table to managing snapshots, performing rollbacks, and running compactions to improve performance.
In this 90-minute workshop, you’ll learn how to:
- Understand the table lifecycle, schema/partition evolution, metadata, and governance touchpoints
- Create and manipulate Iceberg tables with familiar SQL
- Use snapshots and time travel to audit changes and reproduce results
- Perform rollbacks to recover quickly from bad writes or deployments
- Run compaction and maintenance to improve performance and reduce small files
Starburst Office Hours: Secure Data Access with ABAC, RBAC, and Fine-Grained Controls (Webinar) — March 5, 2026
More details & registration link coming soon.
Starburst Galaxy Managed Ingest: Next-Gen Data Ingestion for Iceberg (Webinar) — March 10, 2026
Discover how Starburst Galaxy is redefining data ingestion and lakehouse management with the launch of Managed Ingest. This capability is specifically designed to ingest data directly into Apache Iceberg tables, addressing common challenges in modern lakehouses.
In this webinar, we’ll showcase new features that help data teams ingest more data in more ways, while gaining operational visibility and control at scale within their Iceberg-based lakehouse.
Registration link coming soon.
Starburst Workshop: Migrating from Apache Iceberg from Hive (Webinar) — March 12, 2026
More details & registration link coming soon.