Get early access to free early release chapters (including the newly released chapter!) of the O’Reilly book, Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale, written by Zhamak Dehghani.

By now, you’ve probably heard the term “Data Mesh,” which is a new approach to data architecture that embraces distributed data and addresses the failures of EDWs and Data Lakes. Businesses want to be able to make fast and accurate decisions, but they have been stuck attempting to gain at a “single source of truth,” through centralizing data in one place. Unfortunately, no one has managed to successfully get all of their data in one place in history. Data Mesh architectures help companies make faster, data-driven decisions, by accessing the data where it lives. This approach is:

• Faster: Each domain has what they need to access data within or outside of their own domain.
• Less Complex: Central IT provides access to storage, databases, and other technologies for each domain to use for their own individual purpose.
• Less Expensive: There is no requirement for moving data across domains for the purpose of analytics.

Data Mesh brings out the benefits of distributed data. It puts teams in greater control of their data, speeds time-to-insight, and reduces data movement inefficiencies. Companies adopting a Data Mesh architecture must have an analytics engine capable of federating across these different data sources. Starburst is the analytics engine for the Data Mesh architecture, providing a single point of access to distributed data and empowering self-service analytics for each of the business domains.

With Starburst, there’s no need to chase the idea of a single source of truth. Data is maintained by the domain owners but easily accessible in real-time across your organization. Starburst is built on open-source Trino, a distributed engine that can execute SQL queries against data stored in a range of databases and file systems. With Starburst and Trino, teams can lower the total cost of their infrastructure and analytics investments, prevent vendor lock-in, and use the existing tools that work for their business so that they can concentrate on enabling faster time-to-insights. Trino’s open technology means that integration with other open technologies such as data catalogs and data discovery tools is simpler and reduces the total cost of ownership of the self service data platform.

If you are moving towards adopting a Data Mesh architecture, we want to be there to help. Visit our Data Mesh Resource Center for more information, including reference architecture examples and to see how our customers Zalando and Comcast have implemented a Data Mesh.