Starburst Vision: How We’ll Get There

At Starburst, our mission is simple: We free our customers to see the invisible and achieve the impossible. We help companies see the invisible by giving them access to data they never had access to before, and achieve the impossible by unlocking new opportunities that were never possible before with the monolithic enterprise Data Warehouse model. This vision is a journey, not a destination. The evolution of modern data architectures is a multi-act play and Starburst’s own road map reflects that journey.

The first act is what we call the “Data Lakehouse.” Traditionally, Data Lakes offer inexpensive commodity storage via Hadoop or object storage, open data formats that allow for interoperability with multiple engines such as Spark or Trino, and perfect storage/compute separation that allows you to scale up and down elastically. A Lakehouse architecture takes this Data Lake design one step further and seeks to combine the benefits of both the Data Lake and Data Warehouse by including a high-performance SQL engine and the ability to do updates and deletes on your data. Essentially, a Lakehouse brings “active data warehousing” functionality to the Data Lake.

Starburst and the Trino open source projects that my co-founders created have perfected the Lakehouse use case. Starburst offers faster performance and better concurrency than any query engine. We offer advanced autoscaling, the ability to perform updates and deletes in open table formats like Delta and Iceberg, fine-grained access control enabling RBAC & ABAC, caching capabilities, and tight integration with Azure, GCP, and Amazon, including Glue support.

Act two is all about extending outward from the Data Lake or Lakehouse to a Data Mesh paradigm. Starburst is the analytics engine for a Data Mesh architecture, providing a single point of access to distributed data and empowering self-service analytics across the organization. We do this by offering over 40 connectors to different data sources, we offer high-performance parallel connectors for Data Warehouses like Oracle Exadata, Teradata, and Snowflake, and we offer integrations with Data Governance products like Immuta, Privacera, Okera, and Alation. We also offer a very popular feature we call Starburst Cached Views which allows you to abstract away where the data is even located.

Act three takes our Data Mesh initiative to the next level by allowing for Cross-Cloud and Cross-Region Data Mesh designs. We’ve kicked this off with the release of Starburst Stargate, the industry’s first and only way of executing high-performance SQL analytics on data truly anywhere around the globe. This is important for minimizing egress charges from cloud vendors in a multi-cloud strategy as well as managing data sovereignty and data privacy regulations that require personally identifiable data stay in the country where it was created.

However, like Shakespeare, Starburst is a five-act play, not a three-act play, which means there are still two acts left to go!  Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to deliver on this mission.

To learn more about what we’re building and join us on the journey, contact us at starburst.io!