The Data Engineering Show · 2026-03-24 · 18 min
In this episode of The Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin Wagner sits down with Nikita Lapkov , Senior Software Engineer at Cloudflare, to explore the architecture, design decisions, and future roadmap of R2 SQL- Cloudflare's new R2-based distributed query engine launched in September 2024. What You'll Learn: How to leverage existing query engines strategically : Why Cloudflare chose Apache Data Fusion for single-node query processing rather than building an analytical engine from scratch, freeing engineering resources for distributed orchestration challenges. The stateless architecture pattern for global infrastructure : How to design compute nodes that hold zero persistent state by storing all metadata in a distributed catalog (Iceberg), enabling per-query worker provisioning across 300+ geographically dispersed data centers. Why filter pushdown and metadata-driven pruning are non-negotiable optimizations : How to reduce data scanned from object storage before query execution begins by leveraging catalog statistics and range filtering - the foundation of R2 SQL's performance gains.
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