A
complete
comparison

of
Starburst
and
EMR

Discover how Starburst and Amazon EMR compare across platform access, scalability, simplicity, and optionality, including real customer reviews and G2 Crowd ratings.

What is Starburst Galaxy?

Starburst Galaxy is a price-performant, fully-managed, multi-cloud data lake analytics platform powered by Trino, a leading open-source distributed MPP SQL query engine. Starburst Galaxy is used for both interactive ad-hoc analytics and long-running workloads like batch and ETL/ELT, and offers high scalability and query completion rates even as the amount of data, query volume, and query complexity increases. Galaxy runs federated queries across the data lake, cloud data warehouses, on-premise databases, and relational data management systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL. Galaxy also supports a wide range of business-critical capabilities for big data processing and analytics, such as fault-tolerant execution, smart indexing and caching, building, managing, and sharing of Data Products, machine learning (PyStarburst and integration with Ibis), cross-cloud/cross-region analytics, and universal search and schema discovery.

What is EMR Trino?

As one of over 200 AWS services, Amazon EMR, formerly known as Elastic MapReduce is a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, PrestoSQL, and Trino on AWS to process and analyze vast amounts of data. Using these frameworks and related open-source projects, you can process data for analytics purposes and business intelligence workloads. Amazon EMR also lets you transform and move large amounts of data into and out of other AWS data stores and databases, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. PrestoSQL was renamed to Trino in December 2020. Amazon EMR versions 6.4.0 and later use the name Trino, while earlier release versions use the name PrestoSQL. Their Serverless option pivots on running big data applications on the Amazon Web Services Cloud using open source frameworks while letting Amazon EMR Serverless configure, optimize, secure, and manage clusters for their customers.

Make your big data
analytics easier.
Not harder.

AWS EMR Comparison Factors to Consider

When looking for a data lakehouse solution, you should look for one that lets you pick your open formats, easily works with your data in and around the data lake, and is a hybrid solution, supporting on-premises and in the cloud data storage.

Simplicity

Going beyond key platform governance and management capabilities, a modern data analytics platform empowers data teams with easy-to-use functionality that increases productivity without adding complexity. It allows you to use a range of existing investments in just a few clicks. It allows you to build federated data products from distributed data sets to support business use cases and create and scale self-service usage and adoption across the organization.

Access

True data access empowers organizations with the ability to use all their data, no matter where it lives, across data lakes, data warehouses, and databases while having confidence in security and governance controls. True access is about meeting business needs on time while adhering to regulatory data sovereignty requirements. Your modern data lake analytics platform/lakehouse should free your data sources for analytics purposes, not confine them in another way.

Scalability

Internet scale matters in an internet-powered world but not every workload needs that power and performance. A modern data lake analytics platform puts the control in your hands to ensure high-performance scalability is available at a click of a button or automatically when you need it most while optimizing price-to-performance for all analytics workloads and maintaining confidence that queries will execute as scheduled.

Optionality

Open file and table formats are table stakes in providing optionality. A modern data lake analytics platform goes beyond the fundamentals to ensure your business has full control over your data by accessing data where it lives, allowing choice in cloud providers, security, and BI tools, and ensuring expert Trino support is available if and when your teams need it most.

Simplicity

Going beyond key platform governance and management capabilities, a modern data analytics platform empowers data teams with easy-to-use functionality that increases productivity without adding complexity. It allows you to use a range of existing investments in just a few clicks. It allows you to build federated data products from distributed data sets to support business use cases and create and scale self-service usage and adoption across the organization.

Starburst Galaxy
EMR Trino

Query sharing

Supports AWS Glue and other Data Catalogs

Fully managed SaaS platform

Automated AWS compute plane set-up

Automated cluster management

Multi-cloud platform

Built-in data security

Built-in real-time usage, monitoring, and reports

Build-in data profiling

Built-in data lineage

Automated upgrades to the latest version of Trino

In platform one-click client connectivity

Data Products

Data Products sharing

GenAI text-to-SQL

Automated data lake optimization

Comparison based on publicly available information as of November 30, 2023 *In preview. Contact us to learn more.

Access

True data access empowers organizations with the ability to use all their data, no matter where it lives, across data lakes, data warehouses, and databases while having confidence in security and governance controls. True access is about meeting business needs on time while adhering to regulatory data sovereignty requirements. Your modern data lake analytics platform/lakehouse should free your data sources for analytics purposes, not confine them in another way.

Starburst Galaxy
EMR Trino

Cloud and on-premises data federation

Built-in end-to-end encryption

RBAC/ABAC

AWS Service Account

AWS Lake Formation

Third-party access controls

Enhanced connectors for data access

Cross-cloud and cross-region analytics

In platform universal search and schema discovery

SSO via AWS IAM, Okta, Azure AD, and Google

Column masking and row-level filters

Time-based policies

Streaming ingest

Comparison based on publicly available information as of November 30, 2023 *In preview. Contact us to learn more.

Scalability

Internet scale matters in an internet-powered world but not every workload needs that power and performance. A modern data lake analytics platform puts the control in your hands to ensure high-performance scalability is available at a click of a button or automatically when you need it most while optimizing price-to-performance for all analytics workloads and maintaining confidence that queries will execute as scheduled.

Starburst Galaxy
AWS ERM

Ad-hoc and interactive queries

Graceful and idle shutdown

Consistently execute long-running batch queries

Automated scaling for cost and performance optimization

Automated resizing a running cluster

Autoscaling by nodes

Automated cluster provisioning and sizing

Complex expression pushdown on top of OS Trino

Enhanced Fault Tolerant Execution (FTE)

Smart indexing and caching

Materialized Views

Parallel Connectors

Results and repeated subquery caching

Comparison based on publicly available information as of November 30, 2023 *In preview. Contact us to learn more.

Optionality

Open file and table formats are table stakes in providing optionality. A modern data lake analytics platform goes beyond the fundamentals to ensure your business has full control over your data by accessing data where it lives, allowing choice in cloud providers, security, and BI tools, and ensuring expert Trino support is available if and when your teams need it most.

Starburst Galaxy
EMR Trino

Supports popular open table formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, and Apache Hive)

Supports popular open file formats

OS Trino as query engine

Open source Trino Python client

Run on multiple clouds

Expert in-house Trino support

Supports Python Dataframe API

Supports AWS Private Link, Azure Private Link, and Google Cloud Private Service Connect

Comparison based on publicly available information as of November 3o, 2023 * In preview. Contact us to learn more.

Business Communication Platform

We stored all our data in Amazon S3 and initially used EMR for querying. But as time went on, the demand for insights became unsustainable. That's when we transitioned to Starburst. Now we're experiencing faster insights, improved security, and the added benefit of 24/7 support. It has truly elevated our data analytics capabilities.

Anonymous

Head of Data Analytics, Leading Business Communication Platform

Fortune 100 Pharmaceutical Company

Starburst resolved data access complexities that Amazon EMR couldn’t and delivered unparalleled performance. With a single platform, we reduced time to analytics, streamlined operations, and achieved significant cost savings.

Anonymous

Head of Data Science, Fortune 100 Pharmaceutical Company

American Automotive Company

We switched from EMR to Starburst because we needed a solution that would meet our low compliance, high-availability, and auto-scaling requirements. Now we’ve been able to decrease our query response time dramatically, which in turn makes our data analysts and engineers more productive.

Anonymous

Director of Data Engineering, American Automotive Company

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Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Data Management 2023

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Starburst has been recognized as a 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle Sample Vendor

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