Starburst Galaxy

What do you like best about the product?

Really appreciate the quick turnaround time for resolving any issues.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing is much on the higher side. Plus when it comes to renewal the annual escalation is high.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have huge data of user activities playing different types of games on our various versions of app on android, iOs etc. Through distributed processing, Starburst has been able to provide optimal performance even with immensely high data volumes.

What do you like best about the product?

Starburst was one of the first to offer Fault Tolerant Mode(FTE) with Trino and it enabled us to execute larger queries without any time limit as imposed by other similar query engines like Athena.
Starburst SSO integration and SCIM capabilities along with the IAM integration with AWS was very well implemented. RBAC and ABAC capabilities are also robust.
Starburst support team has also been very responsive so far.

What do you dislike about the product?

Telemetry capabilities are still far from robust. CPU based autoscaling had a lot of issues, but has greatly improved recently. Lack of integration with alerting tools like slack or pagerduty is very limiting and making users to spend time integrating custom plugins. There is also no current feature to warn users if certain queries are blocking the cluster resources or some automatic termination of such queries.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Enabling Data Scientists and DataEngineers to run Large analytical workloads and ad-hoc querying.

What do you like best about the product?

Starburst provides a single point of access to multiple disparate data sources including data lakes, cloud storage, relational databases, and NoSQL systems. This significantly simplifies the analytics process by allowing users to query data in-place, eliminating the need for complex ETL pipelines.
The Security and Governance features are great which helps in auditing etc.

1. Unified Access to Distributed Data
Starburst provides seamless connectivity to a wide range of data sources—relational databases, data lakes, cloud storage, and more—allowing analysts and data scientists to query across silos using standard SQL.

2. High Performance & Scalability
Built on Trino’s distributed SQL engine, Starburst offers fast query performance at scale. Features like cost-based optimization, dynamic filtering, and query caching significantly enhance performance for large datasets.

3. Enterprise-Ready Security & Governance
Starburst integrates with authentication systems and supports fine-grained access control via tools like Apache Ranger, making it a secure option for highly regulated environments.

4. Flexible Deployment
Supports hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem deployments. With Starburst Galaxy, the fully managed SaaS offering, users can get started quickly without infrastructure overhead.

5. Broad Ecosystem Support
It integrates with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and connects with popular BI and data tools such as Tableau, Power BI, and dbt.

What do you dislike about the product?

While Starburst is a strong platform, there are a few areas that could be enhanced:

1. Catalog Creation and Management
Setting up catalogs, especially at scale, can be complex and sometimes unintuitive. Improvements to the user experience, automation, and management of catalogs—particularly in large, dynamic environments—would greatly benefit data engineering teams.

2. Learning Curve for New Users
Though SQL-based, the platform requires understanding of distributed query execution, connector configurations, and performance tuning. Organizations may need to invest in training or initial consulting support.

3. Monitoring and Troubleshooting
While Starburst provides basic query monitoring tools, more advanced observability features (e.g., deeper lineage tracking, proactive performance insights) could further simplify troubleshooting and operational efficiency.

4. Cost Management in Cloud Environments
Given the platform’s power, it’s easy to incur high compute costs when querying large datasets across multiple cloud sources. Resource management policies need to be carefully implemented.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Data Silos
Starburst allows querying data in place, eliminating the need for traditional ETL pipelines that move data into a centralized repository. This reduces latency and complexity.

Performance Bottlenecks in Distributed Queries
Leveraging Trino’s high-performance distributed SQL engine, Starburst enables interactive and scalable analytics over large and diverse datasets.

Lack of Unified Access Across Cloud and On-Prem
With Starburst, we can connect to multiple data sources (across AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem DBs) through a single SQL interface, simplifying analytics and reducing tool sprawl.

Data Governance and Security Challenges
Starburst supports fine-grained access control, auditability, and role-based permissions—essential for compliance and enterprise data governance.

Tool Fragmentation and Analyst Productivity
Analysts and data scientists can use standard BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, or even Jupyter with Starburst to access all relevant data without switching contexts or learning new interfaces.

What do you like best about the product?

Probably the biggest standout from Starburst is that it decreases our dependency on operator data retrieval. We no longer have to extract and put things together from separate locations because it is accessible in a structured format. It has substantially reduced redundant work and made sure that our team dedicates its time to meaningful analysis rather than an excess on data preparation. This has helped us structure our decision making a lot more and has made it more efficient.

What do you dislike about the product?

Starburst is powerful, but some advanced query functions are as complex as you would expect for something that involves moving notoriously complex data. Not all team memebrs are comfortable with some features sometimes which sometimes causes to hindrance as we wait for someone who is more experienced. The documentation could also be clearer, most especially when trying to identify a particular scenario. Because of this lack of clarity, some processes have been slower than they should be.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Starburst has saved a huge amount of time that we used to spend performing data preparation. This means we’re duplexing our limited time concentrating more on applying insights rather than piecing together information from a number of sources. It has proved a great advantage when working on cross functional projects as everyone has the same copy of the information to be able to work on. It has allowed us to work better with less of the usual bottlenecks.

What do you like best about the product?

My favourite Starburst feature is its multi-source querying. It excels at huge data, which speeds up processing. Its integration with Tableau for dashboards and Apache Kafka for real-time data feeding boosts our efficiency. This unified data management solution has greatly improved our analytical operations.

What do you dislike about the product?

Starburst's biggest drawback is resource consumption, which might affect performance with huge data sets. Our analysis and workflow productivity may suffer. System setup and settings are not straightforward, therefore new users need a long initial training period. Sometimes these challenges slowed our work and required extra effort to resolve.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Starburst makes querying several data sources through unified software easy. This has made data analysis faster by allowing us to quickly connect datasets from diverse platforms. We have found that the unified approach has increased our efficiency by allowing us to produce more insights and make more decisions faster. It has improved the ability to meet immediate company demands and possibilities.