Starburst Supports Launch of Delta Sharing, the First Open Protocol for Secure Data Sharing

At Starburst, we believe in building optionality into your data architecture & strategy. To us, optionality means building for flexibility so that you don’t find yourself locked into any one storage system or approach to querying your data. The core tenants of optionality are:

(1) separating where you store data from how you query it to maximize cost savings,

(2) using open storage layer formats, such as Delta Lake, which are efficient and give you fast performance, and lastly

(3) creating an abstracted data consumption layer that can access data wherever it lives today and is portable to where it will live tomorrow, thereby future-proofing your data strategy.

We are tightly aligned with Databricks around these shared beliefs. We’ve been supporters of lakehouse architecture since its inception, which shares our belief around optionality. We’ve predicted that as data lake capabilities mature, they would take the place of traditional data warehouses. We have many clients storing and analyzing data in Delta Lake on Databricks, the foundation of this lakehouse architecture to provide reliability, performance and governance required to support all types of data workloads. We’re committed to being the best-distributed query engine – running analytics at scale wherever data is stored, which is increasingly in lakehouses due to the economics, flexibility, and ability to run analytics on all data types .

Today, we’re happy to show our support for the first open source project for secure data sharing, Delta Sharing. While the Lakehouse architecture and Delta Lake enhancements bring the power of data warehousing analytics to data lakes, Delta Sharing will bring the power of data sharing to the masses. Just announced by Databricks, Delta Sharing is a new open protocol for secure data sharing, centered around Delta Lake, with data governance. This will solve the three main barriers to data sharing: (1) a lack of openness of data sharing solutions, as historically data was locked into a warehouse and you could only participate in data sharing if you were in that warehouse, (2) inability to access all data stores and data types (structured, unstructured) with the tools and systems of choice and (3) security, privacy, and other compliance concerns.

We’re sponsoring the DATA + AI Summit, and you can hear more about our shared Lakehouse vision and support for Delta Sharing in our talk at DATA + AI Summit on Wednesday, May 26th, at 3:15 pm (PT).