Open-source Starburst alternatives

Apache Doris is an open-source analytics database built on a massively parallel processing architecture. It offers fast SQL analytics, acceleration of queries over lakehouse data, and hybrid search spanning structured, text and vector data, and it presents itself as a real-time analytics and search engine suitable for AI agents. It is written in Java.

The README lists use cases that include customer-facing analytics with sub-second interactive queries for external users, data warehousing across business domains, observability for high-throughput logs, events and metrics analyzed with SQL, and AI use where vector, text, JSON and structured search run in one SQL engine. Topics mention lakehouse formats Hudi, Iceberg and Delta Lake and comparisons with warehouses such as BigQuery, Redshift and Snowflake.

Doris is a project of the Apache Software Foundation and Apache-2.0 licensed. You can deploy it on your own clusters, and the website provides release notes, use cases and user stories, with documentation in a large number of languages. It suits data engineering teams that want an open-source, high-concurrency analytical database.

Trino is a distributed SQL query engine built for analytics on large data sets. It was formerly called PrestoSQL, and it lets analysts and engineers run interactive SQL against data wherever it lives rather than first moving it into a single warehouse.

The project's topics point to its role in the data lake ecosystem, with connectors and integrations for systems such as Hive, Hadoop, Iceberg and Delta Lake, and a JDBC driver for applications. Trino is a Maven project written in Java, and its repository covers development guidelines, plugin implementors, a security policy and reproducible builds. It runs as a cluster of servers and has a web UI.

Trino is released under the Apache-2.0 licence and is deployed and operated by the user, with deployment instructions and end-user documentation in the project's user manual. It is a fit for data platform teams that need fast, standards-based SQL over many sources, rather than for individual analysts looking for a point-and-click tool.

StarRocks is a query engine for analytics that returns answers quickly to multi-dimensional, real-time and ad-hoc queries. It is a Linux Foundation project written in Java, and can be used both on its own tables and over data that sits in a data lake or lakehouse without first moving it.

It uses a vectorized SQL engine that takes advantage of CPU parallelism, supports standard ANSI SQL and the MySQL protocol so existing clients and BI tools can connect, and applies a cost-based optimizer to complex queries. Primary-key tables support upserts and deletes with efficient querying during concurrent updates, and materialized views refresh during data import and are chosen automatically at query time.

Data in Hive, Iceberg, Delta Lake and Hudi tables can be queried in place, and its topics point to star-schema, MPP and distributed-database designs. The software is licensed under Apache-2.0 and can be downloaded and run yourself, with documentation, benchmarks and a demo linked from the README. It suits data teams that want fast dashboards and lakehouse analytics without heavy denormalization.

Dremio is a data analytics platform aimed at organizations that want to query and analyze large volumes of data without first moving or copying it into a separate, dedicated analytics database. It positions itself as filling a gap between raw data storage and the tools people need to get value out of that data.

The open-source edition can be built and run locally, exposing a web UI at localhost:9047 once started, or installed as a production tarball for server deployment, with an embedded mode also available. Building it requires a specific combination of JDK versions (21 as default, with 17 and 11 configured in the Maven toolchain for certain tests) plus Maven, reflecting a substantial, enterprise-grade Java codebase.

The README notes that to provide the best possible experience, the build includes some dependencies distributed under non-open-source licenses, so the fully open-source experience may differ slightly depending on build configuration. Dremio is written in Java and the open-source edition is released under the Apache-2.0 license, with full documentation hosted separately.