The Lakehouse Decade: Where Storage Meets Intelligence
A decade-long look at how open table formats reshaped the modern data stack and what comes after the lakehouse.
San Francisco
Jul 22, 2025 · 12:30 PM
All speakers
Speaker
Dr. Amara Okafor
VP, Data Platforms · Meridian Cloud
LakehouseGovernance
Amara leads data platform strategy at Meridian Cloud, where she has spent a decade building the open table formats and governance layers that power modern lakehouses. A returning keynote speaker since 2017.
Talks
Data Contracts in Practice
How explicit producer–consumer contracts cut pipeline incidents by 60% across hundreds of teams.
Denver
Jul 11, 2022 · 2:30 PM
Schema Evolution in Open Table Formats
Safe, backward-compatible schema change strategies for petabyte-scale tables.
Chicago
Jul 16, 2019 · 12:30 PM
Published papers
Delta Lake Time Travel for Point-in-Time Analytics at Petabyte Scale
A. Okafor, J. Rivera
Data Engineering · 2025 · 23 citations
Adaptive Partitioning for Petabyte-Scale Lakehouses
A. Okafor, M. Bell, J. Rivera
Storage · 2025 · 23 citations
Data Contracts: Formalizing the Producer–Consumer Boundary
A. Okafor, T. Han
Data Engineering · 2022 · 146 citations
Foundation Models as a Shared Infrastructure Layer
V. Cruz, A. Okafor
AI Systems · 2021 · 224 citations
Automated Schema Inference for Semi-Structured Data Lakes
N. Gupta, A. Okafor
Data Engineering · 2020 · 135 citations
Schema Evolution Strategies for Open Table Formats
A. Okafor, L. Zhao
Storage · 2019 · 271 citations
Foundations of the Modern Cloud Data Warehouse
M. Bell, A. Okafor, V. Cruz
Analytics · 2017 · 348 citations