Starburst unveils scalable Icehouse implementation on Galaxy platform

Starburst, an open data lakehouse firm, has unveiled its all-inclusive Icehouse implementation on its multi-cloud data lakehouse service, Galaxy, at Data Universe. The launch sees Starburst customers reaping the benefits of the scalable, cost-effective, and high-performance Trino and Iceberg architecture (Icehouse) without bearing the cost and responsibility of creating and managing a custom solution. This launch builds on the remarkable growth of Starburst Galaxy, which has witnessed a three-fold year-on-year increase in active customers and usage volume.

The Icehouse announcement acknowledges a widespread industry trend: organisations are turning to open data lakehouse architecture to drive interactive applications and run their operations. The open-source Trino query engine and the Apache Iceberg table format contribute to powerful scalability, cost-effectiveness, and query performance without the risk of vendor lock-in.

However, the complexity of implementing and truly benefiting from the Icehouse architecture has long held organisations back. The numerous requirements, such as handling data ingestion, data governance, Iceberg data management, and scaling capacity, especially in multicloud environments, have often proved overwhelming.

Starburst's fully managed Icehouse implementation on Starburst Galaxy marks a turning point. Building upon proven Trino SQL analytics, governance, and auto-scaling features in Starburst Galaxy, the new offering includes support for near real-time data ingestion on a petabyte scale into managed Iceberg tables.

Nevertheless, data ingestion at such a scale is only one part of the picture: for data to be useful to an organisation, it must achieve correctness and performance requirements. Starburst's Icehouse allows data and development teams to use easy-to-use Structured Query Language (SQL) to process and optimise data, making it accessible for production use in near real-time. Furthermore, Starburst's Icehouse automatically employs optimised data to improve query performance, enabling interactive use cases without costly expert tuning and code changes.

Justin Borgman, Co-Founder and CEO of Starburst, emphasised the significance of the new offering: "Adding a fully managed Icehouse implementation to Starburst Galaxy marks a significant milestone in our journey to provide the most advanced and user-friendly open data analytics platform available. This enhancement, combined with our suite of innovative features, empowers customers to navigate the complexities of data and analytics with greater ease, efficiency, and accuracy."

Starburst Galaxy has already made evident its potential to transform data management and analytics across various industries. Peter Lim, Senior Data Engineer of Yello, pointed to a 12-fold reduction in computing costs, which has allowed Yello to concentrate on using analytics for revenue-generating opportunities.

Johni Michels, Data Team Lead at Kovi, professed that Starburst Galaxy had significantly enhanced data pipeline performance. Moreover, Lutz Knneke, Director of Engineering at BestSecret, shared his company's successful transition from a monolithic system to a decentralised Starburst and Iceberg set-up, achieving notable cost savings.

Starburst's introduction of a fully managed Icehouse implementation on Starburst Galaxy marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of open data analytics platforms. With its promise of scalability, cost-effectiveness, and performance, coupled with ease of implementation and management, Starburst is poised to continue revolutionising the data landscape for organisations worldwide.