The purpose of this devroom is to discuss developing databases that can meet the demands of modern applications.
Instead of focusing on a single technology or community, our goal is to bring open source database communities and developers together to share their experience, learn from their work, and foster collaboration on challenges ahead.
Where
FOSDEM 2026 will be hosted in person at ULB Solbosch Campus, Brussels, Belgium.
Important Dates
- CFP submission deadline: 3 December, 2025 (at ~23:55 Brussels time)
- Devroom schedule announced: 15 December, 2025
- Devroom takes place: 31 January, 2026
Suggested Topics
- Evolution of new database architecture (e.g., to address scalability, elasticity, reliability in on-prem, distributed, and cloud deployments)
- Integrating AI/ML workloads
- How to ease/streamline database migration (especially from legacy databases)
- Achieving database upgrades without downtime
- How to benchmark and tune distributed databases
- Query optimization
- Tools/methodologies for monitoring, observability, optimizations, testing, etc.
- Working with streaming data
- Stories from end-users (both successes and failures)
- Security, compliance, and data governance
- State of open-source licenses and database communities
- Emerging trends/use cases
These are just suggestions and we encourage you to be creative with your proposals! You can also view accepted talks from the 2025 devroom at https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/databases/.
A few Notes:
- You must be available in person to present your talk at FOSDEM.
- Speaking slots are 25 minutes in length (including Q&A) with 5 minutes between sessions. Note that due to time constraints, number of submissions, etc., we may end up offering a slot duration different than 25 minutes.
- FOSDEM is a FLOSS community event, so please ensure your topic is appropriate (i.e., no sales pitches).
CFP Selection Committee
| Members (listed alphabetically by first name) | Organization/Community |
|---|---|
| Alastair Turner | Percona |
| Anna Widenius | MariaDB |
| Daniel van Eeden | TiDB |
| Edith Puclla | Percona |
| Floor Drees | EDB |
| Frederic Descamps | MySQL |
| Hari Krishna Sunder | Yugabyte |
| Matt Lord | Vitess |
| Mattias Jonsson | TiDB |
| Rohit Nayak | Vitess |
To Submit
Go to the FOSDEM 2026 Pretalx website to submit your talks and select “Databases” in the Track dropdown menu.
Contacts
-
Edith Puclla - Technology Evangelist, Percona
-
Matthias Crauwels - Enterprise Customer Engineer, PlanetScale
-
Ray Paik - Community Manager, TiDB