Yellowbrick Data Inc. today debuted a new release of its hybrid cloud data warehouse that it says will enable enterprises to build analytics workflows more easily and improve information security.

The company also introduced an entry-level product tier for customers looking to analyze only a limited amount of information.

Yellowbrick Data is a Snowflake Inc. competitor backed by more than $170 million in venture funding. The startup’s investors include big names from the venture capital ecosystem, such as Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund, DFJ Growth and IVP. Its customer roster includes brands such as BMW Group.

Yellowbrick Data’s data warehouse can run on a company’s on-premises infrastructure, in the public cloud or both, and can store upwards of petabytes of information. The startup says that the platform is capable of running some queries 100 times faster than the competition. 

The new product release announced today, Yellowbrick Release 5, boosts the platform’s query features with the addition of a capability called SQL user-defined functions. User-defined functions are code constructs that can perform operations on the information in a data warehouse. These code constructs make it possible to implement a data operation only once and then easily reuse it in multiple queries, which saves time for enterprise developers who write a large number of queries to support analytics projects.

Yellowbrick Data has also added capabilities for administrators. A new cluster self-healing feature allows the data warehouse to automatically recover from certain technical issues, which reduces the risk of outages while simplifying maintenance work for administrators. There are also new security controls that will make it possible to regulate what parts of the data warehouse can be accessed by which users in a more fine-grained way.

Lastly, Yellowbrick Data is adding a new, more affordable subscription tier. Companies can now purchase access to its data warehouse starting at $10,000 per month, a price that includes all the key features in the standard version but with a 10-terabyte cap on the maximum amount of information allowed per deployment.

It’s an important addition because the ability to provide lower pricing than the competition has been a key element of Yellowbrick Data’s value proposition. On its website, the startup promises enterprises guaranteed savings of at least 50% if they switch to its data warehouse from Snowflake’s rival platform. Another advantage of the lower-cost subscription tier is that it should enable Yellowbrick Data to target smaller customers that may not need to store petabytes of data but still require the capabilities of a fully featured data warehouse. 

“Release 5 strengthens our product for demanding fault-tolerant  applications, and our new Standard Service Plan extends the power of Yellowbrick to smaller use cases than before,” said Yellowbrick Data Chief Executive Officer Neil Carson. 

Image: Pete Ashton/Flickr