Datastrato Iceberg Lakehouse Platform vs Starburst Galaxy

Datastrato Iceberg Lakehouse Platform is a federated metadata catalog for connecting data sources and governing access across clients. Built on Apache Gravitino and Iceberg REST Catalog, it provides a standards-compliant REST catalog with metadata caching and table maintenance for production lakehouses. It can register Iceberg, Hive, Glue, relational databases, Kafka, filesets, and models in place without copying metadata. Spark, Flink, Trino, and Dremio are named Iceberg catalog clients, and the same namespace resolves across BigQuery. Governance includes catalog-level role-based access, row filtering, column masking, tag-based policies, and auditing across engines and agents. S3, GCS, and ADLS are supported with short-lived scoped credentials per principal. Agents can use an MCP metadata interface and GVFS under the same access controls. Per-table compaction, snapshot expiry, and orphan cleanup jobs can be sent to Airflow, Kubernetes, EMR, or Databricks. Enterprise is installed with a Helm chart in Kubernetes and activated by license key. Pricing is on request; the commercial distribution includes support with a defined response commitment and maintained release line.

Starburst Galaxy is a managed cloud analytics platform built on Trino. It lets teams query data across sources in one SQL query without copying it, with availability on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Starburst lists more than 50 data sources, including Amazon S3, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and Azure Blob. Galaxy can stream from Kafka or load CSV, JSON and AVRO files into Iceberg. Its LakeOps service automates Iceberg table compaction, snapshot expiry and orphan-file removal; AIDA converts natural-language questions into governed insights through a customizable interface or MCP. Security provisions include fine-grained RBAC and ABAC, encryption, data classification and private connectivity. Starburst describes Galaxy as SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA-ready. A free plan allows up to three clusters for ad hoc queries in standard execution mode. Usage charges vary by plan and cover items such as compute, ingestion and private-link data transfer. A 30-day trial includes Enterprise features and $500 in compute resources. Starburst recommends Galaxy for organizations without resources to manage complex data clusters.