Why We Built a Forever-Free Lakehouse Platform

Organizations want to quickly, easily and efficiently analyze vast amounts of rapidly-growing data. At Dremio, we believe that an open data lakehouse, which combines the benefits of data lakes and data warehouses on an open foundation, is the best way to do this.

I’ve written before about the advantages of an open architecture compared to a cloud data warehouse. With an open lakehouse architecture, unlike a cloud data warehouse, data itself takes center stage, no longer hostage to specific vendor formats or systems. Companies can choose the right data processing engine for each use case – from BI to machine learning – both today and in the future.

Today, we’re making two game-changing announcements that make data lakehouses easier than ever before.

I’m excited to announce the general availability of Dremio Cloud, the world’s first free, fully managed data lakehouse platform, and the addition of two new services: Dremio Sonar, a lakehouse query engine, and Dremio Arctic, an intelligent metastore for Apache Iceberg that provides a unique Git-like experience for the lakehouse.

Dremio Cloud: Making Data Lakehouses Easier Than Ever

Up until today, lakehouses have been too difficult. Companies need to be able to focus on deriving value from their data instead of getting consumed in system setup and maintenance. This complexity has been a major inhibitor for data lakes and lakehouses.

Dremio Cloud is a frictionless, infinitely scalable platform that helps organizations run all their SQL workloads and automate data management operations. We designed it to be the lakehouse platform that data teams love - it’s built for SQL, provides a Git-like experience, and is open and forever free.

1. Built for SQL

Dremio Sonar was built from the ground up to support all SQL workloads, including mission-critical dashboards, ad-hoc queries, and in the coming weeks, data mutations (DML). Sonar provides all of the performance and functionality of a data warehouse without the costs, the need for excessive data copies and complex ETL pipelines, or the risk of lock-in.

In addition, Sonar provides a seamless integrated experience for analysts who know and love SQL. With Sonar’s SQL Runner, analysts have a best-in-class SQL IDE that includes auto-complete, multi-statement execution, and the ability to save and share SQL scripts. Sonar’s SQL Profiler is a visual query profiler that helps users understand and optimize query performance.

2. Git-like Experience

Dremio Arctic is an intelligent metastore for Apache Iceberg that simplifies data engineering by making data workflows as powerful and intuitive as working with source code.

Arctic gives data teams a completely new way to work with data by supporting git-like branching, merging, and tagging. Users can experiment with data without impacting production workloads or creating physical copies of data. This enables capabilities like multi-statement transactions, safe and easy experimentation, and referential integrity.

3. Open and Forever-Free

With Dremio Cloud, your data remains in your own data lake storage, persisted in open source table and file formats like Apache Iceberg and Apache Parquet. You can choose the right engine for your workload, and easily adopt new technologies that emerge in the future.

We want data lakehouses to be as easy to use as possible, for everyone from seed-stage startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. All of Sonar and Arctic’s key capabilities are available through Dremio Cloud’s forever-free Standard edition. And, you can use Dremio Cloud for as much and for as long as you want, because the forever-free edition supports unlimited production use and infinite scale.

Changing the Data Game Forever

Our vision at Dremio is to make corporate data as easy to access and use as personal data. The Dremio Cloud platform and its two key services, Sonar and Arctic, make accessing and analyzing corporate data easier than ever by delivering a frictionless, forever-free lakehouse experience.

We’re extremely excited about these game-changing announcements, and this launch would not be possible without the hard work, innovation, and collaboration of hundreds of people around the world, across Dremio and key open source projects like Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, and Project Nessie.

Dremio Cloud is available today for free — I invite you to sign up today to experience it yourself!