Dremio launches free data lakehouse service for enterprises

California headquartered Dremio has made the free edition of its SQL lakehouse service generally available.

Officially dubbed Dremio Cloud, the service enables BI dashboards and interactive analytics directly on cloud data lake storage through seamless integrations with Tableau, Power BI and other BI tools. Dremio says that the offering is designed to be perpetually free and backed by an open architecture, meaning no vendor lock-in. This will give enterprises an easy way to get started with Dremio lakehouse, although it must be noted there is also an enterprise edition of the product which will add advanced security controls such as custom roles and enterprise identity providers, and enterprise support options. 

“Dremio Cloud is the world’s first lakehouse platform that was built from the ground up for SQL workloads, including mission-critical BI,” Billy Bosworth, CEO at Dremio, said. “In the past, companies had to weigh the pros and cons of data lakes vs. data warehouses. We’ve eliminated this tradeoff by providing a frictionless and infinitely-scalable service that delivers the combined benefits of both.” 

Free Dremio Sonar and Arctic services

With the free cloud offering, Dremio is also bringing forever-free editions of Dremio Sonar and Dremio Arctic with unlimited production use and infinite scale, end-to-end security and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. 

Sonar, as the company explains, is an Apache Arrow-powered SQL engine that provides the performance and functionality of a data warehouse on Amazon S3 object storage as well as a self-service experience that makes data consumable and collaborative. It fully supports all operations of a data warehouse query, including inserts, updates, and deletes, and enables enterprises to run mission-critical business intelligence (BI), from ad-hoc queries to low-latency dashboards, directly on the lakehouse. The solution is more than two times faster than Dremio’s existing query engine, thereby requiring less than 50% of the cloud infrastructure previously needed. 

“Companies can plug Dremio Sonar into any existing data lake and start querying in minutes, with support for multiple lakehouse metastores, including AWS Glue and Dremio Arctic, as well as the ability to query Amazon S3 directly,” Tomer Shiran, founder and chief product officer at Dremio, said. “In addition, organizations can easily analyze data that resides outside the lakehouse (e.g., in relational databases) and perform live and accelerated joins across multiple sources.”

Dremio Arctic, on the other hand, is a metadata and data management service that leverages open source projects Iceberg and Nessie to provide a unique Git-like experience for the lakehouse and automatically optimizes data to ensure high-performance analytics. As part of this, it provides a GitHub-like user interface for data governance and observability, branching capabilities for isolated ingestion, transformation and experimentation, and the ability to help data analysts and data scientists to reproduce historic dashboards or machine learning models without maintaining data copies. The offering is currently in public preview, while Dremio Sonar is generally available.

Race to build lakehouse

The move comes as the latest step from Dremio to strengthen its lakehouse offering. However, it is not the only player vying to draw enterprises and become the one-stop-shop for all things business data. Montana-based Snowflake and San Francisco-based Databricks are also in this race and bringing both data lake and warehouse capabilities on a single platform. Both companies have also launched products optimized for specific industry use cases. 

Just last month, Dremio had also raised $160 million Series E funding at a $2 billion post-money valuation. For reference, Snowflake, a public entity, has a market capitalization of about $77 billion (as of March 2022) while Databricks last reported valuation stood at $38 billion.