Starburst, the data platform powering AI and applications, announced major product innovations across Starburst Enterprise Platform and Starburst Galaxy. The release introduces Starburst AI Agent and AI Workflows to accelerate enterprise AI projects, simplify data governance, and modernize data lakehouse architectures. These enhancements enable faster, secure, and collaborative data access across distributed, hybrid environments, empowering enterprises to unlock the full potential of their data for AI, analytics, and apps.
Challenges in AI Data Architecture
AI initiatives push existing data infrastructures to their limits. Fragmented data scattered across clouds, formats, and teams complicates AI workflows, requiring brittle pipeline stitching and siloed coordination. Legacy systems hinder secure data access and governance, slowing experimentation and increasing risk. Starburst’s innovations address these barriers by creating a unified, governed data foundation built for AI readiness.
Starburst AI Innovations Overview
- Starburst AI Agent (Private Preview):
A built-in conversational interface enabling natural language queries and insight generation within a secure Starburst environment. Designed for data analysts and AI applications to accelerate access to governed data. - Starburst AI Workflows (Private Preview):
A suite connecting vector-native search, metadata context, and governance to unlock proprietary data without data movement. Features AI search, AI SQL functions for prompt orchestration, and AI Model Access Management for secure, governed AI usage. - Simplified AI Governance with Galaxy (General Availability):
AI-Powered Auto-Tagging uses large language models to detect sensitive data like PII for scalable attribute-based access control (ABAC), enabling secure, self-service access without manual policy work. - Starburst Data Catalog (Private Preview):
An enterprise-grade metastore with native Iceberg support, Hive migration ease, and multi-engine integration to reduce metadata sprawl, improve query speed, and streamline governance without vendor lock-in. - Fully Managed Iceberg Pipelines & Maintenance:
Starburst Galaxy offers automated table maintenance including compaction, snapshot cleanup, and orphan file removal to keep Iceberg tables performant and cost-efficient. Streaming ingest and file loader options support real-time and batch data updates. - Scale and Performance Enhancements:
Automated Table Maintenance, AWS S3 Table buckets support, nanosecond timestamp precision, and Starburst-Native ODBC driver for faster, secure BI connectivity across Galaxy and Enterprise. - Automatic Query Routing:
Role-based and deployment-set routing optimize query performance and scalability by directing workloads to appropriate clusters.
Leadership Insights
Justin Borgman, CEO and Co-Founder, emphasized that AI’s power depends on accessible data and that Starburst removes friction by enabling distributed hybrid data lakeside architectures. Matt Fuller, VP of AI/ML Products, highlighted Starburst’s commitment to operationalizing AI securely and at scale in both air-gapped and cloud environments.
New Service Offering: Data-to-AI Readiness Blueprint
Starburst now offers a comprehensive engagement to assess and align data infrastructure for AI strategies. This service delivers a customized roadmap, architecture blueprint, and data product design guidance to help enterprises build future-ready data foundations optimized for AI innovation.
Starburst’s latest innovations transform the data lakehouse into an AI-ready platform, addressing core challenges of data fragmentation, governance, and pipeline complexity. By integrating AI Agents, Workflows, advanced governance, and scalable lakehouse capabilities, Starburst empowers enterprises to accelerate AI adoption, improve security, and derive actionable insights faster.
