Around 60 participants joined three technical talks and a lively Q&A session in BIFOLD's event space.
On October 24, 2026, the Berlin Ecosystem for Analytics and Data Systems (BEADS) kicked off the Tech Meetup Series at BIFOLD in Berlin. Around 60 participants from industry, start-ups, and academia came together for three technical talks, a lively question-and-answer session, and informal networking afterward.
Stefan Grafberger (Snowflake) spoke on bridging relational database engines with AI, showing how Snowflake's SQL Datatypes team is building support for querying unstructured data such as documents, images, audio, and video directly within SQL. Sven Wagner-Boysen (Databricks) presented their work on AI governance, arguing that while AI agents can reason and act, they cannot exercise human judgment or accountability, and introduced Databricks' Unity Gateway approach to enforcing identity, access control, and guardrails for agents. Olga Ovcharenko (BIFOLD) presented SemBench, a new benchmark her team developed to test and compare semantic query processing engines, database systems that embed large language models directly into the query engine, across 55 queries spanning text, image, and audio data.
The kick-off event underlined the value the BEADS meetup series offers to Berlin's data community, with detailed technical questions and extended discussions continuing during networking afterward. BIFOLD thanks all speakers, participants, and everyone who helped organize the event.
Stay in touch with BEADS: the next event is the BEADS Summit on October 21, 2026. Register here
