Lester Martin
Trino Developer Advocate - Starburst
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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Lester Martin is a seasoned developer advocate, trainer, blogger, and data engineer focused on data pipelines & data lake analytics using Trino, Iceberg, Hive, Spark, Flink, Kafka, NiFi, NoSQL databases, and, of course, classical RDBMSs. Check out Lester's blog at https://lestermartin.blog.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Enhancing AI agents with data products
AI agents are all the rage and using TextToSQL features they can easily interrogate your traditional tabular data structures metadata to provide quality results. Creating business-curated and well-documented data products allows richer metadata to be consumed by the underlying LLMs to ultimately enhance the quality & accuracy of the responses provided by AI agents.
After presenting this high-level concept, live demonstrations will show you how these AI agents work on basic table structure metadata as well as the enhanced responses once datasets are curated and documented.
Building RAG apps using SQL
While the first-generation of GenAI tooling for data engineers and AI engineers focused on construction via Python, SQL users can also participate in this critical space. The theory of unstructured document parsing/chunking/embedding transformations and how this can be used in a RAG application will be presented.
This presentation will quickly move to demonstrations of showing a simple unstructured document ETL pipeline that uses SQL to create and store vector embeddings in Apache Iceberg tables. It will then move to show how to use SQL to retrieve additional context from the vector embeddings that most closely match the user’s initial request and then augment the formal request to an LLM before returning the final response.
Universal truths from 3 decades in software & data engineering
Take a break from all the technical sessions for a good-natured, but highly-relevant, look at the environment we work in and the 'universal truths' that help explain it all. These truths have been compiled by a technologist whose 30+ year career has spanned mainframes, client/server, web-based technologies, and data engineering, not to mention methodologies like waterfall, RAD, agile, and DevOps.
Expect insights for sure, but also expect to smile a bit (maybe even laugh) as you realize we all deal with same 'stuff' on a daily basis. Besides a bit of humor, the real goal is to help you become a better engineer and have more effective team dynamics working with all the other 'individuals' around you.
You'll be glad you came and will be recharged for your next technical session, not to mention be a much more enlightened person from all the insights you just gained.
Apache Iceberg ingestion with Apache NiFi
A cornerstone requirement of an Icehouse (Iceberg + Trino) is data ingestion. One approach is to leverage Apache NiFi. NiFi, a multimodal data pipelining tool, has a multitude of processors that can be assembled into a flow to address your specific scenarios. NiFi's low-code/no-code approach allows data engineers to rapidly build, deploy, and monitor their data ingestion & transformation pipelines. NiFi also allows custom processor development with a variety of languages, including Java and Python.
This presentation will iterate through a few common approaches and ultimately demonstrate a rich data pipeline that sources data from Kafka, performs typical transformation processing (including enrichment), and loads data into a high-performance Iceberg table that will be consumed via Trino.
DataEngBytes - Sydney
Building Trino data pipelines with SQL or Python
Implementing the medallion architecture with Starburst
Community Over Code Asia 2025 Sessionize Event
DataEngBytes - Melbourne
Building Trino data pipelines with SQL or Python
Implementing the medallion architecture with Starburst
Berlin Buzzwords 2025
Apache Iceberg ingestion with Apache NiFi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yH9PfiXb9Y
Lester Martin
Trino Developer Advocate - Starburst
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Actions
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