Choose your Starburst product #

This guide provides details and explains the key differences between our products, so you can choose the best solution for your organization’s needs.

Starburst products overview #

Trino is at the core of our products. Trino (formerly Presto® SQL) is the fastest open source, massively parallel processing SQL, query engine analytics of large datasets distributed over one or more data sources in object storage, databases and other systems.

Starburst Galaxy is an easy to use, fully-managed and enterprise-ready SaaS offering of Trino. Configure your data sources, and query your data wherever it lives. Starburst takes care of the rest so you can concentrate on the analytics.

Starburst Enterprise platform (SEP) is a fully supported, enterprise-grade distribution of Trino. It add integrations, improves performance, provides security, and makes it easy to deploy, configure and manage your clusters.

Starburst Galaxy #

Starburst Galaxy is the cloud-native and fully-managed service highly performant Trino SQL query engine. It includes a user interface that allows you to query a variety of data sources or join data across multiple data sources through a single query. Complex procedures, including deployment and upgrade, are completely taken care of for you.

With Starburst Galaxy, you can use SQL and the business intelligence or reporting tool of your choice to analyze your data and gain insights quickly.

Starburst Galaxy is recommended for organizations that don’t yet have resources to manage complex data clusters.

Learn more about Starburst Galaxy from our documentation, videos, other resources, or give it a test run with a free trial.

Starburst Enterprise #

Starburst Enterprise adds integrations, improves performance, and provides a platform to deploy, configure, and manage your clusters. It is available for use in Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure ecosystems as a direct Helm chart deployment in their respective Kubernetes services, or on bare metal using our Ansible-based Starburst Admin deployment tool.

SEP is recommended for the following scenarios:

• You require a specific connector.
• You required self-managed deployment in your own infrastructure.
• You have specific security requirements regarding authentication and authorization to SEP and the connected data sources.
• You use a client tool that is only supported by SEP

Learn more about SEP in our documentation, or try it out with a free Starburst Galaxy trial.

Considerations for choosing your Starburst product #

The following are important factors to consider when choosing a Starburst product:

• People and available skills in your organization
• Variety and location of data sources
• Location of your computing resources
• Security and governance requirements

People #

As you decide the best Starburst product and deployment style for your organization, the skill sets available in your organization are very important factors. Review our architecture getting started guide to get an idea of what skills your team will need.

The necessary steps to configure and use client tools are similar for Starburst Galaxy and SEP

Starburst Galaxy requires minimal expertise from data engineers and platform administrators. Administrative tasks are handled with a user-friendly interface.

Starburst Enterprise requires in-depth knowledge of data sources and deployment platforms. You need the deep expertise of platform administrators and data engineers to create, configure, and maintain clusters capable of running Starburst Enterprise. Your organization must also have people who can connect the desired data sources and ensure that data security and governance requirements are met. People with these skill sets usually sit within your IT department. Using a public cloud provider or marketplace offering can help reduce the workload.

Data sources #

The data sources you plan to query have a large impact on your choice. You need to understand what databases, object storage, or others systems your users need to query. In addition, you need to know where these system are deployed to ensure that Starburst Galaxy or Starburst Enterprise can access them with sufficient network performance and capacity.

For example, if all your data is stored in your private network and data center, you should run Starburst Enterprise there as well. However, if all your data is hosted on a public cloud provider, you can choose to run Starburst Enterprise on the same cloud provider yourself, or use Starburst Galaxy.

We recommend using Starburst Galaxy, if catalogs for your data sources are available.

Starburst Enterprise includes a large variety of connectors to support the most common data sources. They include many RDBMSs, Hadoop/Hive and other object storage systems, and commercial platforms such as Snowflake or Teradata. In addition, Starburst Enterprise can be operated anywhere. If your organization needs to query a large collection of data sources, Starburst Enterprise is the right choice for you. You can choose various options on how to run it, and ensure it is located closely to your data sources.

Location #

Here are some things to consider when choosing a location for your Starburst Galaxy or Starburst Enterprise cluster, minimizing data transfer between different clouds and deployment networks:

• Can you place your cluster in a cloud that contains multiple data sources?
• What data sources are most likely to be federated between different cloud providers, regions, and network? Where is the largest of them?
• Is one of your cloud provider pricing models more favorable than the others?

The closer you can put your clusters to the bulk of your data, the more you can reduce the amount of data being returned, and therefore, save on data transfer costs.

If you have multiple large data sources in different locations, and you do not need to access both sources in the same queries, you can also consider running multiple clusters, each co-located to the relevant data sources.

Security #

What does data security and governance look like at your organization?

Starburst Galaxy and SEP include a powerful role-based access control systems for authorization (Galaxy open_in_new / SEP open_in_new). It allows you to manage roles and privileges with the user interface or SQL statements.

Additionally, Galaxy includes an attribute-based access control (ABAC) system that uses policies and attributes, such as tags, to help further manage role access to entities such as catalogs, schemas, tables, and views.

More information is available in the Starburst Galaxy security documentation.

Starburst Enterprise supports the following security features:

• Authentication platforms such as LDAP, Kerberos or OAuth.
• Data access control with user impersonation, credential passthrough and others.
• Authorization management with built-in access control (BIAC), Ranger, Privacera platform, or Immuta.

The location and mode of running Starburst Enterprise specifically determines which security features can be used. For example, if your company relies on Apache Ranger to secure your data, then a self-managed Starburst Enterprise deployment in a private cloud deployed with Kubernetes or with Starburst Admin is most likely the right choice for you.

Depending on your particular security needs, one or more marketplace offerings may also work. Starburst Enterprise includes Helm charts for Apache Ranger installation and usage on Kubernetes.

Our security getting started guide provides a good introduction to the security measures available for Starburst products.