Hussein Awala
Sr. Data Engineer at Datadog | PMC member and committer at Apache Airflow
Paris, France
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Hussein is a Senior Data Engineer at Datadog, specializing in Big Data processing and management with extensive experience in Lakehouse technologies, Spark ETL, Kafka streaming, and Airflow scheduling.
In addition to his role at Datadog, Hussein is proud to be a committer and PMC member on Apache Airflow, and a contributor to different open-source projects including Apache Iceberg and Apache Hudi.
Area of Expertise
Topics
A SQL Query is Just a DAG: Building a SQL Engine on Apache Airflow
Ever wondered what happens between typing `SELECT ... GROUP BY` and getting results back? Inside every SQL engine lives a scheduler that breaks your query into a DAG of tasks — shuffling, sorting, aggregating, and parallelizing work across partitions. Sound familiar?
In this talk, I'll demystify SQL engine internals by building one on top of Apache Airflow. We'll take a SQL query, parse it, optimize it, and transform it into a DAG of Airflow tasks that you can watch execute step by step in the Airflow UI.
You'll walk away understanding:
- How SQL engines plan and schedule query execution
- What shuffle, partition, and pipeline-breaking actually mean
- How query parallelism works under the hood
No PhD in databases required — just curiosity and an Airflow UI to watch it all unfold.
Contributing to Apache Airflow
By attending this workshop, you will learn how you can become a contributor to the Apache Airflow project. You will learn how to setup a development environment, how to pick your first issue, how to communicate effectively within the community and how to make your first PR - experienced committers of Apache Airflow project will give you step-by-step instructions and will guide you in the process. When you finish the workshop you will be equipped with everything that is needed to make further contributions to the Apache Airflow project.
Airflow Summit 2026 Sessionize Event
Hussein Awala
Sr. Data Engineer at Datadog | PMC member and committer at Apache Airflow
Paris, France
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