5 minute read · November 30, 2023

What’s New in Dremio: New Gen AI Data Descriptions and a Unified Path to Iceberg with Dremio v24.3 and Dremio Cloud.  

Colleen Quinn

Colleen Quinn · Product Marketing, Dremio Sonar

The Dremio Unified Analytics Platform brings your users closer to the data with lakehouse flexibility, scalability and performance at a fraction of the cost.  We're excited to show you some new things we've been working on to help you analyze your data faster and easier than ever, no matter where it's stored.

We’ve launched AI-powered data discovery capabilities to accelerate and simplify data contextualization and description for analytics, along with improved capabilities extending our leadership as the best analytics engine for Apache Iceberg.

Read on to learn more about new and enhanced capabilities in Dremio Software Enterprise Edition version 24.3 and Dremio Cloud Enterprise Edition.

Generative AI for Data Context and Discovery (Dremio Cloud only)

Dremio continues to innovate with new Generative AI capabilities to make analytics easier and more accurate. New AI-powered wiki descriptions and labeling for tables and views ensure data has comprehensive business context for analytics, while reducing time and effort. AI-powered wiki descriptions can also be generated and applied to data sources and folders to provide essential data context. 

Improved Enterprise Reliability & 100% Query Success

We know you rely on Dremio for your most essential BI workloads. That’s why we are always working to make Dremio even more reliable. Now, for Dremio deployments on Kubernetes, we’ve enabled autoscaling for memory and CPU, reducing costs and making your Dremio deployment even more robust. In addition, for all Dremio deployments, Dremio is even more scalable - able to manage queries against terabytes of data easily. When memory arbiter and spillable operators are used, Dremio users will have a more durable query experience with almost zero risk of query failure due to memory.

Get More from Apache Iceberg

Dremio is also delivering a unified path to Iceberg - making it simple to adopt and convert all of your data to Iceberg, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Dremio can seamlessly convert raw data from data lake sources and non-Iceberg tables from databases and data warehouses into Apache Iceberg. This allows organizations to quickly and scalably migrate from less performant and functional formats to a modern, open table format that supports data warehouse functionality on the data lake, enabling a data lakehouse.

In addition to existing support for simplified conversion of CSV and JSON files into the Iceberg table format, we’ve expanded to support Apache Parquet conversion. Now you can easily adopt Iceberg through one-click / command ingestion into Iceberg by seamlessly converting any raw data (in JSON, CSV and Parquet formats). 

We’ve also improved Iceberg write support with improved DML efficiency and concurrency. And, we’ve introduced a new transparent metadata caching technology for Iceberg and Delta Lake which eliminates the need for manual refresh operations, delivering more speed with zero effort. 

Always Faster & More Performant

To deliver continuous performance gains, we continue to improve query execution performance, optimizing system resource utilization. We’ve also enhanced our query planning, now using Apache Iceberg statistics and optimization to deliver superior query performance without any tuning.

In addition to improved query engine performance, we’ve also optimized how Dremio reads data. Dremio now supports vectorized reading for Parquet 2.0, which delivers a 70% performance increase when analyzing Parquet 2.0 files. 

Finally, we’ve launched an Updated Tableau connector using Flight JDBC which delivers  ~30% improvement in Tableau query performance. 

Expanded SQL Coverage with New Functions

We are also introducing additional SQL functions for an even more comprehensive SQL engine. New SQL functions include: array_agg, array_append, array_distinct, array_prepend, arrays_overlap, array_to_string, and set_union.

Get started now!

All of these capabilities are available now!  If you’re already a Dremio Self-Managed customer, it’s easy to upgrade. Visit our Support Portal to download the latest version. Dremio Cloud Users, simply log in to get started!  Not yet a Dremio user? Visit the Get Started page to find offerings for Dremio Cloud or Dremio Self-Managed.

Ready to Get Started?

Enable the business to create and consume data products powered by Apache Iceberg, accelerating AI and analytics initiatives and dramatically reducing costs.