Starburst Enterprise 435-e LTS product release

Announcing the release of Starburst Enterprise (SEP) 435-e LTS release.  This long-term support (LTS) release continues Starburst’s commitment to introducing features and improvements designed to enhance the capabilities, efficiency, and user experience of the Starburst open data lakehouse. Let’s dive into the significant features of this release, their use cases, and the benefits they bring to your data and analytics initiatives.

 

Increasing support for Open Lakehouse   

Open-source Trino has enabled optionality across data sources, file formats, and table formats. Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake have been available in Starburst Enterprise by default because of Trino. In this release, Apache Hudi now joins Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake as a supported, enterprise connector. Along with the promotion to a supported connector, this release adds a configuration option to the Apache Hudi connector to enforce that a filter on a partition key be present in the query.

Read more about the Apache Hudi connector in our documentation.

Discoverability, security and governance enhancements

In an increasingly diverse data landscape, it’s important for enterprises to quickly discover data, apply appropriate governance policies, and add data-level security.  To help customers accomplish these goals, this release of Starburst Enterprise includes the following features and enhancements:

• Schema discovery (public preview)- Schema discovery in Starburst Enterprise identifies and registers tables and views that are newly added to a known schema location. For example, when a logging process creates a new log file every hour, rolling over from the previous hour’s log file, schema discovery locates newly added files so that users in SEP can query them. Schema discovery in SEP ensures that data remains accessible, supports good governance practices, and further reinforces the data lakehouse architecture by empowering data lake analytics. Read more about Schema discovery in our documentation.
• Location privilege support for Apache Ranger policies (general availability) The SEP integration with Apache Ranger now allows you to set location privileges to ensure the correct users have appropriate access to objects in specific object storage locations. With this added supported, data teams can improve overall data security and compliance, enforce granular access control policies, isolate and segment to prevent data leakage, and improve resource utilization for better auditing and monitoring. 
• SCIM (general availability) – SEP can be configured to synchronize users and groups with external providers using the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol. Once users and groups have been synchronized across services, use access control systems in SEP to provision access to data. With SCIM support now generally available in SEP, data teams in production can improve security and compliance, ensure that access control policies remain consistent across different systems and applications, and easily update internal records to reflect changes in users or group changes. 

Connectors. Connectors. Connectors. 

Starburst Enterprise is known for being a very powerful MPP SQL query engine and for data federation, as well as the advanced capabilities added to our existing connectors. SEP’s connector enhancements are diverse and far-reaching to suit the additional needs of enterprise data organizations, including performance improvements and support for data transformations that enable more advanced analytics. The Starburst Enterprise 435-e LTS offers updates to the open-source Trino connectors, as well as improvements to the enhanced connectors added by Starburst:

Neo4j connector (public preview) – Starburst Enterprise now offers a first-party connector for the popular graph database provider Neo4j. With this connector, data teams can use Neo4j with Starburst Enterprise to model complex relationships.

Querying views created in Amazon Athena (public preview) – With this feature, Athena users now benefit from cross-account access to views shared from other AWS catalogs from Starburst Enterprise, and leverage those views with the Starburst Hive connector. SEP ensures that views created in Athena can be queried seamlessly using the same connector, maintaining compatibility and consistency. 

MongoDB Kerberos credential pass-through (general availability) – This release includes support for passing Kerberos credentials from SEP to MongoDB, ensuring robust authentication, seamless integration, mutual trust, and efficient data access.

SingleStore parallel read operations (general availability) – The Starburst SingleStore connector has been enhanced to read data from SingleStore using multiple parallel connections for partitioned tables. In situations with low concurrent access, parallel reads ensure timely responses. With this enhancement, users can expect drastic performance and scalability  improvements from multiple reads being executed simultaneously as a distributed workload across available resources.  As a result, users connecting to SingleStore via Starburst Enterprise can also experience faster extraction and loading times in the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process.

Did someone say Java?

The Starburst Enterprise 435-e LTS release added support for Java 21. Released in September, 2023, Java 21 introduced a wide range of features, many of which support faster and more efficient Java development. Users can expect to benefit from these features within the Starburst Enterprise 435-e LTS release.

Summary

The Starburst Enterprise 435-e LTS release is representative of our continued commitment to bringing necessary and forward-looking enhancements to Starburst Enterprise, and a step forward in our journey to provide the most advanced and user-friendly data analytics platform for your open data lakehouse. These features not only enhance the technical capabilities of Starburst Enterprise but also provide tangible business benefits, from improved security and governance to increased efficiency and performance.  

These are just some of the highlights that have made it into this quarterly LTS release. For a complete list of features and changes, read the 435-e LTS release notes. Contact us to learn more.