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CommunityCore Festival Week

Starburst AI Meetup: Building an agent for your data - the good, the bad, the ugly

Hosted by Starburst

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

6:00 PM–9:00 PM ET

About

Come join Starburst at their office in Boston for an AI-centered meetup. We will have food, drinks, and a fun night of talking about building AI Agents! Our speaker for the meetup will be Alex Albu, Sr. Staff Engineer at Starburst. Here is what he will talk about: Everyone's building AI agents that query databases. Most of them work fine on a toy dataset in a demo. Fewer survive contact with real enterprise data – distributed across dozens of sources, governed by access controls, queried by users who have no idea what the schema looks like. Even fewer have to do that using a wide variety of models. This talk is about what we actually learned shipping an AI agent on top of a distributed SQL query engine at Starburst. We'll cover the specific ways things broke and how we fixed them. You'll leave with an honest picture of what production AI agent work looks like, and a handful of specific techniques that made a real difference. Agenda for the meetup: 6:00 PM - Network 6:30 PM - Alex Albu's session 7:00 PM - *Potential additional speaker 7:30 PM - Networking, games, and drinks

Speakers

  • Alex Albu, Sr. Staff Engineer at Starburst

Host

Starburst

Location

Starburst HQ

101 Federal Street, Boston, MA 02210

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