Starburst

Starburst is a sophisticated data lakehouse platform designed to unlock the value of distributed data for analytics and artificial intelligence. Built on the powerful open-source Trino (formerly PrestoSQL) query engine, Starburst provides a single, unified access point to data regardless of its location—be it in cloud data lakes, on-premises data warehouses, or hybrid multi-cloud environments. The core principle of Starburst is to bring the query to the data, not the other way around. This eliminates the need for costly, complex, and slow data movement and ETL processes, allowing organizations to analyze their data in place, in near real-time.

The platform is engineered for high performance and massive scalability, capable of running complex SQL queries on petabyte-scale datasets with thousands of concurrent users. It serves as the query and access layer in modern data architectures like the data lakehouse and data mesh, empowering data teams to build faster, more accurate AI models and deliver quicker business intelligence insights.

How to use Starburst

Getting started with Starburst is designed to be flexible and align with your organization's infrastructure strategy. The process generally involves these steps:

1. Choose Your Deployment Model: Select from two main offerings. Starburst Galaxy is a fully managed SaaS platform, ideal for teams wanting to get started quickly in the cloud without managing infrastructure. Starburst Enterprise is a self-managed software package for deployment in your own on-premises data centers or private cloud, offering maximum control and customization.
2. Connect Your Data Sources: Use Starburst's extensive library of over 50 connectors to link to your various data sources. This includes data lakes (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage), data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift), relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra), and more.
3. Discover and Govern Data: Utilize the platform's data discovery tools to search and understand available datasets across all connected sources. Implement robust security and governance policies using built-in features for role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) to ensure data is accessed securely and compliantly.
4. Query and Analyze: Data scientists, analysts, and AI applications can now use standard ANSI SQL to run queries across any combination of connected data sources. The queries are executed by the distributed Trino engine, providing fast results for ad-hoc analysis, BI dashboards, and data preparation for machine learning.

Core Features of Starburst

• High-Performance Query Engine: Powered by Trino, it offers massively parallel processing (MPP) for lightning-fast SQL queries on large datasets.
• Data Federation: A single query can join data from multiple, disparate sources (e.g., a data lake and a relational database) without data movement.
• Extensive Connectivity: A vast library of 50+ connectors to access data wherever it lives, with native support for open table formats like Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Hudi.
• Warp Speed: A proprietary smart indexing and caching technology that dramatically accelerates queries (up to 7x) and reduces compute costs by creating and managing materialized views automatically.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: Features fine-grained access control, column-level security, data masking, and comprehensive auditing to meet strict compliance requirements.
• Flexible Deployment: Available as a fully managed cloud service (Starburst Galaxy) or a self-managed platform for on-prem and hybrid environments (Starburst Enterprise).
• Data Discovery and Cataloging: Integrated tools to help users easily find, understand, and trust the data they need for their analysis.

Use Cases for Starburst

Starburst is versatile and addresses several critical data challenges:

• AI and Machine Learning: Provides AI models with fast, unified access to all enterprise data, significantly reducing the time spent on data preparation and feature engineering.
• Data Lakehouse Analytics: Enables organizations to build and query a high-performance data lakehouse on affordable cloud object storage, achieving data warehouse-like performance at a fraction of the cost.
• BI and Interactive Analytics: Powers interactive dashboards and ad-hoc queries for business users, delivering insights in seconds or minutes, not hours or days.
• Data Mesh Implementation: Serves as the universal query and data access plane in a data mesh architecture, allowing domain teams to easily discover and consume data products from across the organization.
• Cross-Cloud and Hybrid Analytics: Allows for querying and analyzing data that is spread across different cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-premises systems without costly data transfers.

Advantages of Starburst

The primary advantages of adopting Starburst include:

• Speed: Drastically reduces query times, enabling faster decision-making and innovation.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Eliminates expensive data duplication and reduces reliance on costly traditional data warehouses and complex ETL pipelines.
• Simplicity: Provides a single point of access and a single SQL dialect for all data, simplifying the data stack and democratizing data access.
• Flexibility: Works with your existing data and infrastructure, avoiding vendor lock-in and supporting a future-proof, open architecture.
• Enhanced Governance: Centralizes data security and access control, making it easier to manage compliance and reduce risk.

Pricing and Plans

Starburst offers a flexible pricing structure tailored to different needs:

• Starburst Galaxy: Operates on a freemium and consumption-based model. It includes a free trial with up to $500 in usage credits to allow new users to explore the platform's capabilities. After the trial, pricing is based on usage, providing cost-effective scalability.
• Starburst Enterprise: This self-managed option is priced through custom enterprise licenses. Interested parties are encouraged to contact the Starburst sales team for a personalized quote and to request a trial license key.