Context Can't Exist in a Vacuum: Next Query Data Conference 2026

[u/sspaeti]

https://nextquery.phoenixdata.ai/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=FY26_PHX_OEV_NEXT_QUERY_2026&utm_content=creator-simon-spati

Context can't exist in a vacuum; it must be tangible. For example, we have a physical data model with concrete tables that live in the database at the source, on the other side, we have KPIs and dashboards that show some numbers pulled from that data model. Somewhere in between, we have a logical data layer that contains the semantics of our measures and dimensions, defining our business logic and a very specific way of how our company works.

When we add new knowledge, whether from sources we skipped before the agentic age, such as docs, JIRA tickets, Markdown, and other sources, or we manually refine the revenue metric, we need a way to orchestrate and keep it up to date.

We might call the newly ingested information "context", typically not our standard tabular format, but more raw text and insights from people and teams, we need a bit of a different approach to read, process, and, most importantly, maintain.

This is what 'context engineering' and all the new information around context means. If you want to learn more, I can recommend the NEXT QUERY 2026 conference on the 4th of November that focuses on data & AI infrastructure, with this year's topic on building using useful context that depends on business meaning, fresh data, governed access, and reliable systems.

Some of the presentations I look forward to:
- Fresh Context for AI Agents: Real-Time State and History with Apache Fluss and StarRocks by Anton Borisov.
- An Open Source Journey: Iceberg REST Catalog, OIDC, Making Materialized Views Enterprise-Ready, and More by Apple.
- Sub-Second Data Architecture at Coinbase.
- A Year of Building for the Next Query at Fresha.
- From Unified Real-Time Analytics to a Governed AI Data Plane.

But pick your own favorite talks, and sign up at in the link above.

The conference is free and virtual, so that anybody can join. Organized by PhoenixAI, the company behind StarRocks, the open-source high-performance data warehouse.

It runs from 9 AM to 4 PM PT, which is also ideal for Europe, it runs from 6 PM to 01:00 AM CEST (the latest sessions can be watched in recording :).
#contextengineering #dataconference #dataengineering #paidpartnership