Starburst announces free software to accelerate COVID-19 Data Discovery + Analytics

Starburst Enterprise Presto now available for free for healthcare researchers

BOSTON, March 17, 2020 – Starburst today announced a free offer aimed at helping healthcare professionals stop the spread of COVID-19. The offer is available for the duration of 2020 and is specifically for universities, hospitals, and healthcare research organizations, including Government and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) who have teams dedicated to analyzing COVID-19 data. 

One of the challenges facing research teams is not having access to data fast enough. Additionally, as we’ve seen in China and Taiwan, earlier detection is key to slowing the spread of the virus. This can only be done by combining multiple data sets such as travel history based on geo-location data, and symptom data from medical records. Typically, research organizations struggle to find the resources to acquire the right technology to join diverse data sets and provide fast access. 

Created in 2012 at Facebook and then open-sourced, Presto was built to provide faster access to big data. The active open source project benefits from major contributions from companies like Uber who originally contributed code to facilitate geospatial queries, which the Presto communityFacebook Presto team later optimized. That functionality could be extremely valuable for researchers today. Starburst makes Presto enterprise-grade, with solutions for easy deployment and management of Presto, 24×7 support from experts, and the security features that ensure appropriate access to sensitive data.

“We want to put all medical researchers who are focused on stopping the spread of COVID-19 in a position to do their jobs as fast as possible,” said Justin Borgman, Chairman & CEO, Starburst. “We already help healthcare teams run fast SQL analysis across multiple data sets, and our solution comes with enterprise-grade security standards required to process sensitive health and personal data.”

The offer is best suited for organizations that have in-house data architects and engineers with big data analytics experience, and research teams that run SQL-based queries. It is available for the duration of 2020 and includes:

• Starburst Enterprise Presto — a fully supported, production-tested and enterprise-grade distribution of the open source Presto SQL query engine. It includes additional connectors for commercial database systems, query optimization, as well as management tools. 
• Security features which include role-based access control, data masking & encryption, column and row-level security, and integration with Apache Ranger.
• 24×7 support from the Presto experts.

Starburst is making this offer available to universities, hospitals, and healthcare research organizations that have teams dedicated to analyzing COVID-19.

To learn more about this offer and if your organization qualifies please contact us at STOPCOVID19@starburstdata.com.

About Starburst 

Starburst is on a mission to power analytics anywhere. We help companies quickly unlock the value of their data by making it easy to access. We do this with Presto, an open source SQL query engine that enables data consumers to access any data where it lies. Starburst Enterprise Presto is purpose-built to ensure Presto security & performance at scale. Starburst also provides enterprise-grade features and 24×7 support from the Presto experts. Organizations like Zalando, Grubhub, Comcast, and FINRA rely on Starburst to execute fast queries across their data lake, and even federate queries across different sources. Stop moving data, start using data. For more information: www.starburstdata.com