Introducing cross-cloud analytics in Starburst Galaxy

Today, up to 85% of businesses are using two or more cloud platforms. Many organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in, leverage best-of-breed services, and distribute workloads for enhanced performance and resilience. However, this diversity introduces data fragmentation, making it challenging to consolidate information and derive actionable insights. 

We’ve seen teams with multi-cloud architectures easily get swamped with one-off requests to join two disparate datasets for a single point-in-time analysis. This means data engineers spend precious cycles building single-use ETL pipelines just to migrate a copy of data from one cloud to another. 

That’s why we are so excited to introduce cross-cloud analytics in Starburst Galaxy. Now, teams can find, access, and manage their diverse data sources, irrespective of the cloud platform.  

Cross-cloud analytics is built to help data engineers:

• Enhance internal data with third-party sources – Add third-party catalogs to your Galaxy domain to gain a comprehensive view of your business.
• Unify distributed architectures post-M&A – Immediately start querying and joining your disparate data sources without having to wait on time consuming centralization efforts.
• Perform cloud migrations – Use simple SQL commands to write data across clouds directly from the Starburst Galaxy UI instead of building complex data pipelines.

Enhance internal data with third-party sources

Many businesses today combine internal data with external sources such as demographic data, market research, social media trends, or industry benchmarks. This lets businesses gain a broader understanding of their target audience, market trends, and competitive landscape. 

However, this data is oftentimes joined manually as one-off asks or informal tasks due to extensive data engineering backlogs. The rogue analyst will export large quantities of data and manually combine them in Excel spreadsheets with a VLOOKUP (or if they’re advanced INDEX MATCH MATCH). Not only is this process prone to errors, but the data also quickly becomes stale.

Cross-cloud analytics in Starburst Galaxy can help address these challenges by making it easy to join data sources no matter where they live. All data teams need to do is connect the external data source to Galaxy and write a simple SQL statement to join two data sets, as opposed to waiting weeks for a data engineer to migrate one data source to another location. We expect that this will not only increase data engineering productivity but also help cut down on backlogs.

Whether it’s enriching your customer dataset with Google Analytics data stored in BigQuery, or integrating economic data into your data stack to better predict retail demand, our solution seamlessly integrates disparate cloud datasets, enabling you to extract maximum value from your data.

Unify distributed architectures post-M&A

Mergers and acquisitions often result in complex data integration challenges. Each organization involved in the merger or acquisition may have its own data architecture, formats, and standards. As a result, consolidating and integrating the data from different sources becomes complex and time-consuming.

Starburst Galaxy provides a unified platform to immediately access and connect organizational data following such transformative events. Our solution enables you to consolidate data from multiple sources, eliminate silos, and derive meaningful insights from a unified view of your newly expanded organization in minutes. Then, you can optimize the data stack at your own pace. 

Perform cloud migrations

Trino, the OSS query engine that Galaxy is built on, is designed to handle large-scale data processing and analytics workloads. It can effortlessly scale horizontally by adding more compute resources, enabling organizations to process vast amounts of data efficiently in the cloud.  And the flexibility of Trino means you can model, compress, or change the storage format of your data so that it lands in a more desirable state than when you started the migration. 

This flexibility and scalability is crucial for handling the increased data volumes and processing demands often encountered during cloud migrations. By using Starburst Galaxy for your cloud migration, you guarantee a smooth transition by ensuring data integrity, security, and speed throughout the migration process. Say goodbye to complex data transfer methods and welcome simple cloud migrations with Starburst Galaxy.

How to get started

Cross-cloud analytics is coming soon to Starburst Galaxy. Once it ships, you will be able to get started in just three steps:

1. Create a new cluster in the cloud provider and region of your choice
2. Connect the catalogs you want to query to the new cluster, irregardless of where the data is located
3. Start querying!

To stay up to date on the latest product releases including cross-cloud analytics, email feedback@starburstdata.com with the subject line “I’m interested in Galaxy cross-cloud”.