The Data Fusion Secret & Why Custom Query Engines Fail with Nikita Lapkov

What if building a distributed SQL engine meant rethinking everything about how query execution works at scale? In this episode, Benjamin sits down with Nikita, Senior Software Engineer at Cloudflare, to explore how R2 SQL leverages object storage and distributed computing to power analytics across 300 global locations, why backward compatibility becomes critical when you can't control infrastructure rollouts, and the key strategies for handling joins and adaptive query execution in a stateless, point-to-point network architecture. Whether you're designing distributed systems or curious about how Cloudflare processes petabytes of data, this conversation reveals the real-world engineering challenges and innovations shaping the future of cloud data platforms.