Apache Polaris
The Definitive Guide

Alex Merced is a senior technical evangelist at Dremio with experience as a developer and instructor. His professional journey includes roles at GenEd Systems, Crossfield Digital, CampusGuard, and General Assembly. He co-authored "Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly and has spoken at notable events such as Data Day Texas and Data Council. Alex is passionate about technology, sharing his expertise through blogs, videos, podcasts like Datanation and Web Dev 101, and contributions to the JavaScript and Python communities with libraries like SencilloDB and CoquitoJS. Andrew Madson is an experienced data leader with 17 years of experience leading technical teams. Currently the Head of Evangelism and Education at Tobiko - the creators of SQLMesh and SQLGlot, Andrew has held senior leadership positions at institutions such as JP Morgan, LPL Financial, MassMutual, and Arizona State University. In addition to leading data teams, Andrew is a professor of data science and analytics at several universities, where he teaches graduate courses in machine learning, statistics, SQL, R, Python, Tableau, and Power BI. Tomer Shiran is the Founder and Chief Product Officer of Dremio, an open data lakehouse platform that enables companies to run analytics in the cloud without the cost, complexity and lock-in of data warehouses. As the company's founding CEO, Tomer built a world-class organization that has raised over $400M and now serves hundreds of the world's largest enterprises, including 3 of the Fortune 5. Prior to Dremio, Tomer was the 4th employee and VP Product of MapR, a Big Data analytics pioneer. He also held numerous product management and engineering roles at Microsoft and IBM Research, founded several websites that have served millions of users and hundreds of thousands of paying customers, and is a successful author and presenter on a wide range of industry topics. He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.