about the author
Alex Merced is the Head of Developer Relations at Dremio, where he helps developers understand and adopt modern data lakehouse architectures. He focuses on open table formats, semantic layers, and cloud-native analytics platforms that enable scalable, AI-ready data systems. Alex runs DataLakehouseHub.com, a resource hub for engineers navigating the evolving lakehouse ecosystem.
He is the author of three books: Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly), Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly), and Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse (Manning). Alex is a regular speaker at global conferences including Data Council, Data Day Texas, OSA CON, Nerdearla, Øredev, Confluent’s Currents, StreamNative’s Data Streaming Summit, and Dremio’s Subsurface.
Beyond writing and speaking, Alex actively contributes to open source. His projects include SencilloDB, a lightweight in-process document database in JavaScript; Pangolin Catalog, a Rust-based lakehouse catalog implementation; CoquitoJS; and Python libraries such as dremioframe and iceframe for working with Dremio and Apache Iceberg. Through books, articles, videos, podcasts, and community leadership, he continues to advocate for open data architectures and practical innovation across the analytics ecosystem.