What inspired you to go with Starburst?

I suppose it’s quite a cool name, but I didn’t choose it just based on the name! We wanted something that was easy to use, scale, and ultra-secure. One of the main points that inspired us to go with Starburst was its emphasis on security at a very granular level which was a huge differentiator for us.

Where does Starburst fit in your overall data strategy?

Data Mesh and Big Data is at the center of our business strategy and Starburst is the engine that runs that for us. In healthcare, providing better patient care is all about having access to the right information at the right time. We have deliberately built a model around a Data Mesh that allows us to bring data from different sources into the care setting so the patient can get care that is most appropriate.

Which critical technologies are you integrating with Starburst?

In terms of technologies, we have SQL Server, AWS React Components, Apache Superset, and a whole load of Azure. We have a wide range from quite legacy thick design all the way up to modern responsive apps on mobile. And Starburst integrates well with all of them. Some of our customers have had some real success using Tableau with Starburst.

What are your three favorite Starburst features?

My favorite Starburst features are:

• Operational Dashboard: The ability of the dashboard to decompose the execution of the query into its component stages is informative when you are trying to optimize very big queries. It is almost addictive to watch a big query run!
• Scalability: I also quite like the general scalability and the product’s ability to talk to databases that are very big or have very large numbers of columns or rows in a predictable and sensible way.
• Security: I feel reassured having the great security of Starburst, knowing that I can do other exciting things.

Which business outcomes are you most proud of?

I’m really proud of generating an outcome for humanity that has changed the way we treat COVID-19. We have published ground breaking research on the treatment of COVID-19 based on analytics done by Starburst on our data, and that’s an extremely exciting thing for a technologist to say! We are also releasing novel papers at a rate of one every two weeks, so that is an incredibly fast rate at which we are making new scientific discoveries with this platform.

What success have you been able to measure?

The time to data discovery has significantly gone down. It would have previously taken 48 hours to get information to people which we can now do in four hours or less. So, the ability to consume that data that much more quickly means that you can do so many different things with it. You can do things in real time and have a big impact on the patients, and Starburst has helped us do all of this.

Do you think decentralized data access and Data Mesh are the future of analytics at scale?

Data Mesh is certainly the future for our business, and probably for many others, particularly ones which have a legacy of acquisitions, and the need for merging of different data sets to form a new larger entity. Having the ability to query data where it resides using Starburst is enormously powerful and makes a huge impact on the ability for data to provide answers.