About Russ

Russell Spitzer received his Ph.D from UCSF in after performing a lot of comparisons of protein binding sites. Following that, he became deeply invested in distributed computing and joined Datastax, a company using Apache Cassandra. While working at Datastax he was a key contributor to the DataStax Spark-Cassandra Connector and also worked on many other Apache projects. After leaving Datastax he worked at Apple growing the then nascent Apache Iceberg project where he worked on data file management and advancing the table format. Currently Russell is working on OSS software at Snowflake and is a PMC member of the Apache Iceberg project, and a PPMC member of the Apache Polaris (Incubating) project.

Some of The Talks I’ve Given

• Transactions and Isolation in Apache Iceberg : Iceberg Summit 2025
• Iceberg At Apple : Iceberg Summit 2024
• Handling Small Files in Apache Iceberg : Subsurface 2023
• Managing Data Files in Apache Iceberg : Subsurface 2022
• Multi Dimensional Clustering with Z Ordering : Scale By The Bay 2021
• DataSource V2 and Cassandra – A Whole New World : Spark + AI Summit 2020
• To Spark or Not To Spark : DataStax Accelerate 2019
• Applying custom rules to Spark’s Catalyst Optimizer : Scale By the Bay 2018
• Apply Hammer Directly to Thumb: Avoiding Spark & Cassandra Anti-patterns:Spark Summit 2018
• A Tale of Two Graph Frameworks: Tinkerpop and GraphFrames:Spark Summit Europe 2017
• Cassandra and SparkSQL: You Don’t Need Functional Programming for Fun: Spark Summit 2017
• Building your first Spark and Cassandra App : SFSpark Meetup 2016
• Spark and Cassandra: 2 Fast, 2 Furious : Spark Summit 2016
• Maximum Overdrive: Tuning the Spark Cassandra Connector : Cassandra Summit 2016
• Cassandra and Spark Optimizing for Data Locality : Spark Summit 2015
• Spark Cassandra Connector: Past, Present, Future : Cassandra Summit 2015
• Cassandra and Aeris: IoT Pains, Gains, and Automobiles : PubNub IoT Conference 2015 (w/ Drew Johnson)

Discussions

• Distributed Data Show: What’s new in Apache Spark

My SlideShare (with even more talks but less actual talking)

Russell Spitzer on SlideShare