Alex Merced is the Head of Developer Relations at Dremio, where he educates, entertains, and enlightens audiences about modern data lakehouse architecture and open-source innovation. He runs DataLakehouseHub.com, a resource hub for engineers and practitioners navigating the growing lakehouse ecosystem.

Alex is a regular speaker at global conferences such as Data Council, Data Day Texas, OSA Con, Nerdearla, Øredev, Confluent’s Currents, StreamNative’s Data Streaming Summit, and Dremio’s Subsurface. His talks often center on open table formats, metadata management, and the future of cloud-native data platforms.

He is the author of three books:

• Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly)
• Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly)
• Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse (Manning)

Beyond writing and speaking, Alex contributes to the open-source community through several projects, including:

• SencilloDB – a lightweight, in-process document database in JavaScript
• Pangolin Catalog – a Rust-based lakehouse catalog implementation
• dremioframe / iceframe – Python libraries for working with Dremio and Apache Iceberg

He continues to advocate for open data architectures and supports the growing community of developers working at the intersection of analytics and open-source technology.