Fresh off a $100 million venture capital infusion that vaulted it to unicorn status, Starburst Data Inc. today announced a managed version of its analytics platform based on the Presto distributed database management system.

Starburst Galaxy combines cloud-native features such as rapid deployment and massive scalability with high-powered security features that include multifactor authentication, fine-grained access controls and detailed security audits. The product is functionally identical to the self-managed version Starburst has been offering in cloud marketplaces, but the self-managed features relieve users of much of the overhead of configuration and management.

“The ease of deployment makes it effectively on-demand,” said Chief Executive Justin Borgman. Starburst joins a long line of software vendors that have recently released cloud-native managed services to supplement or replace earlier products that originated in data centers and were transplanted to the cloud.

Galaxy is intended specifically for multicloud analytics and is based on an enterprise version of the open-source Trino SQL query engine, which was formerly known as Presto SQL. The project was rebranded in December following what Borgman said was pressure from the Linux Foundation, which took over curation of Presto after creator Facebook Inc. donated the trademark to open source last year.

Presto, a distributed SQL query engine, had been the subject of some confusion after its four original developers created a fork called Presto SQL as the foundation for the commercial version sold by Starburst. “At the time they didn’t anticipate much confusion because they were basically the spiritual successors to Presto,” Borgman said. “Toward the end of last year, the Linux Foundation started to become pretty aggressive. We had to change the name or else.” All four of the original developers have worked for Starburst since the company was launched.

Presto and its derivatives are known for speed, scale and flexibility running SQL queries against a variety of source storage systems using software “connectors,” which transfer and control data drawn from other sources.

Starburst is often mentioned in the same context as Snowflake Inc., which staged the largest initial public offering in software industry history last September, and Databricks Inc., which just last week announced a massive $1 billion capital infusion. Both offer cloud-native data warehousing features that work against a wide variety of back-end sources.

Borgman described his company’s relationship with Snowflake and Databricks as “coopetition,” industry lingo for businesses that engage in both competition and cooperation at the same time. “Because we’re a database without storage, Snowflake is a data source and we have a connector for that,” he said.

Databricks is a popular platform for data science and machine learning, whereas “we’re just SQL,” he said. “That makes these tools complementary. You can slap Starburst onto the front and perform SQL queries.”

Image: Pixabay