Turning the Database Inside Out Again: What if Everything was Iceberg?

At Confluent Current London 2026, hosted at the ExCeL Centre, Streambased Founder and CEO Tom Scott takes the stage to revisit one of the most influential ideas in modern data architecture.Inspired by Martin Kleppmann’s Turning the Database Inside Out, Tom explores how event streams became foundational and where the industry went off track by layering on complexity through fragmented pipelines, materializations, and duplicated datasets.

In this session, Tom brings the conversation back to first principles before pushing it forward. He outlines a new approach to continuous data architecture, where real-time and historical data are unified end-to-end. By combining Kafka with Apache Iceberg, Tom demonstrates how organisations can build a single, coherent data platform where multiple data representations emerge naturally from a true source of truth.

Recorded live in London, this talk captures Streambased’s perspective on simplifying modern data stacks while unlocking greater flexibility, reusability, and clarity for data engineering teams.

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