Starburst Enterprise Platform 443-e.1 LTS product release

Announcing the release of Starburst Enterprise (SEP) 443-e.1 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. This release focuses on moving key capabilities previously announced as public preview to being ready to support production workloads with confidence as generally available.  Let’s dive into the significant features of this release, their use cases, and the benefits they bring to your data and analytics initiatives.

Now Generally Available 

Managed statistics in Starburst Enterprise Platform (SEP) works by collecting and storing statistical information about tables within the platform’s metadata – becoming very handy when some data sources may only collect or expose a limited number of statistics. By configuring managed statistics for specific data sources, users can ensure a more comprehensive and accurate representation of their data, even when the original source lacks sufficient statistics.  Data teams can benefit from enhanced query performance, resource optimization, improved data exploration, and adaptability to diverse data sources. Learn more on how to get started with Managed Statistics.

Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0)  in  SEP enables platform administrators to enforce authentication to implement single sign-on (SSO) for SEP clusters enabling a secure way of handling authentication by exchanging digital associations between the identity provider and the service provider. SAML makes management of user credentials and permissions much easier for admins to control access to SEP clusters. SAML also helps organizations meet compliance requirements that mandate the use of SSO and secure authentication methods. When you configure SAML 2.0 with SEP, SEP acts as a SAML service provider and receives authenticated user data from an identity provider (IdP) using HTTPS. Learn more on how to get started with SAML 2.0.

AWS Lake Formation in SEP makes it possible to use an existing Lake Formation access control system to enhance native data management and security capabilities found within Starburst. With Lake Formation, data teams can define fine-grained access policies, beyond in platform RBAC, at the database table, column, row, and cell levels, ensuring that sensitive information is accessed only by authorized users. SEP and Lake Formation enable AWS customers to access data where it lives and apply the necessary governance policies to that single point of access. Learn more on how to get started with SEP and AWS Lake Formation.

Shared queries in SEP now take collaboration to the next level with the aim to make it easier for data teams to work together and reduce duplication of effort. Within SEP, users can now easily share a tab in the query editor with other users to edit or run the query – protected by access controls – themselves. Owners of the SQL querycan grant or remove access in just a few clicks. Furthermore, users can also view all the queries that have been shared with them in a simple to use experience making review and reusability easier. Learn more on how to get started with Shared Queries.

Additional capabilities making it into 443-e.1 LTS

In addition to key performance, governance, and collaboration capabilities moving to general availability, there are some new items debuting this LTS as well – also as generally available. This includes new support for Apache Ozone with Amazon S3 using the S3 Gateway with Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Hudi table formats. Security and governance get an additional boost with location privileges for built in access control and support for Vault by Hashicorp and AWS Secrets Manager as external configuration providers. 

Summary

The Starburst Enterprise 443-e.1 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. Read the 443-e.1 LTS release notes for a complete list of features and changes. Contact us to learn more.