CelerData Targets Data Lakehouse Analytics Performance With Latest Release

March 15, 2023 at 2:15 p.m. EDT

The launch of CelerData V3 follows the company’s decision to give its analytics database, StarRocks, to the Linux Foundation for support as an open source community project.

CelerData is targeting the fast-growing data lakehouse space with a new version of its powerful unified analytics platform, featuring a cloud-native architecture, real-time streaming analytics, and support for Hudi, Iceberg, and Delta Lake open spreadsheet formats.

The new release, CelerData V3, comes just a month after CelerData contributed StarRocks, the MPP-SQL database for real-time analytics on which CelerData’s software is built, to the Linux Foundation, where it continues as an open-source project.

CelerData’s founders, including CEO James Li, developed StarRocks in 2020 and the company retained the StarRocks name until October 2022 when it was incorporated as CelerData. Today, the company is selling its commercial on-premises CelerData Enterprise and managed cloud service Celerdata Cloud.

[Related: 10 Tools For Tackling The Big Data Deluge]

“So right now, StarRocks is officially under the leadership of the Linux Foundation project,” Li Kang, CelerData’s strategy vice president, said in an interview with CRN. “The idea was to better support the open source community as we have more and more contributors from other companies. It’s easier to contribute to the project outside of CelerData.”

Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, CelerData targets the Enterprise and Cloud editions of its analytics engine for high-performance, real-time data analysis tasks. The company’s position is that data lakehouse analytics is now limited and prohibitively expensive, and that many query engines struggle to support ad hoc queries, real-time analytics, and large numbers of concurrent users.

With the new capabilities of the latest version of the CelerData system, “we offer the flexibility of data lake analytics with the power of data warehouse analytics, while adding other real-time analytics to the same platform. And all these great features without the cost of [a] cloud data warehouse,” said Kang.

CelerData is working with a number of systems integration partners who are assembling end-to-end data lake solutions using the CelerData platform, and Kang said those partners who have been working with the updated software have improved with the new features Query and analysis performance see the V3 version.

Key to this is CelerData V3’s integration with open data table formats such as Hudi, Iceberg and Delta Lake, which CelerData says allows the CelerData query engine to be used on data lakes without data ingestion. Kang said other cloud data warehouse systems have limited support for open data table formats.

The new release enables real-time streaming analytics on a data lakehouse, as opposed to the usual practice of building a separate system for streaming data analytics.

The new release gives users the ability to bring data into the CelerData storage format to improve Data Lakehouse query performance, the company says. In addition, materialized views can be created on multiple tables to further improve query performance.

The V3 release, which is expected to be available in early April, offers a cloud-native architecture that leverages cloud object storage for improved reliability and reduced data storage costs, according to CelerData. It also enables better workload and resource isolation to create different data warehouses for different use cases.

The new multi-table materialized view capability simplifies data pipelines by allowing materialized views to be created from multiple common base tables to accelerate query performance. And users can now ingest raw data and perform data transformations within CelerData, which also simplifies the data processing pipeline.