StarTree Opens the Iceberg Lakehouse to the Outside World, Turning Passive Storage into a Real-Time Engine for Customer and AI Applications
New capabilities in StarTree Cloud unlock real-time analytics on Apache Iceberg, without data duplication or complex pipelines
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- StarTree, the cloud-based real-time analytics company, today announced support for Apache Iceberg in StarTree Cloud, enabling it to serve as both the analytic and serving layer on top of Iceberg, delivering interactive insights to internal and external applications directly from the data lakehouse. With this launch, StarTree redefines what’s possible with Iceberg, transforming it from a passive storage format into a real-time backend capable of powering customer-facing applications and AI agents with high concurrency serving thousands of simultaneous users with consistent speed and reliability.
“We’re seeing explosive growth in customer-facing, and increasingly agent-facing, data products that demand sub-second responsiveness and fresh insights. At the same time, Iceberg is emerging as the industry standard for managing historical data at scale,” said Kishore Gopalakrishna, Cofounder and CEO, StarTree. “As these two trends converge, StarTree is delivering unique value by acting as a real-time serving layer for Iceberg empowering companies to serve millions of external users and AI agents securely, scalably, and without moving data.”
While Apache Iceberg and Parquet have become popular open table formats for managing data in the lakehouse, they are not query engines and most existing query engines built around them struggle to meet the performance SLAs required for external-facing, high-concurrency analytical applications. As a result, companies have historically avoided serving data directly from their lakehouse, instead relying on reverse ETL pipelines or transforming the data into proprietary formats for separate serving systems—adding latency, complexity, and cost. StarTree removes these constraints by offering real-time query acceleration directly on native Iceberg tables. By combining open table formats like Parquet and Iceberg with Pinot’s powerful indexing and high-performance serving capabilities, StarTree enables applications to deliver live, interactive insights directly from the lakehouse without data duplication, format conversion, or operational trade-offs.
A Real-Time Serving Layer for Iceberg
StarTree Cloud integrates directly with Iceberg using open standards (Parquet and Iceberg table formats) and enhances performance with powerful indexing, intelligent materialized views (StarTree Index), and localized caching. Unlike traditional tools like Presto, Trino, or ClickHouse that rely on lazy loading and scanning, StarTree is built for low-latency, high-concurrency access, making it ideal for powering interactive dashboards, real-time data products, and operational workloads with strict SLAs.
Key capabilities include:
- Native support for Apache Iceberg and Parquet in StarTree Cloud
- Real-time indexing and aggregations, including support for numerical, text, JSON, and geo indexes
- Intelligent materialized views via the StarTree Index
- Local caching and pruning for low-latency, high-concurrency queries
- No data movement required—serve directly from Iceberg
- Intelligent prefetching from Iceberg, minimizing irrelevant data scans
With StarTree Cloud, companies can now unlock the full potential of their lakehouse investments and deliver modern, intelligent user experiences without architectural sprawl.
“Apache Iceberg is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for managing large-scale analytical data in the open data lakehouse—adoption has surged by over 60% year-over-year, according to theCUBE Research,” explained Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. “But as more organizations look to power real-time, customer-facing applications with this data, a clear gap has emerged in the market. StarTree’s ability to serve Iceberg data with sub-second latency and without data duplication is a unique and timely advancement. It addresses a critical performance need for accessing historical data in modern data products.”
Availability
Support for Apache Iceberg in StarTree Cloud is available today in private preview. For more information, visit www.startree.ai.
Supporting Resources
About StarTree
At StarTree, we understand the urgency of the on-demand economy and help businesses like Citi, Stripe, DoorDash, Nubank, Zomato, and Dialpad deliver real-time analytics into their user-facing applications. StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot™, is a fully-managed real-time analytics Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). StarTree’s platform is built to power insights for millions of users at massive speed and scale, and a fraction of the cost of alternatives. Whether user-facing apps, or backend APIs and microservices, real-time analytics are now a required component powering internal and customer-facing dashboards. With StarTree, customers unlock the full potential of their data while exceeding millions of user expectations. StarTree is closely partnered with analytics leaders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Confluent, Databricks and others to help customers achieve their real-time analytics goals.
Additional information may be found at www.startree.ai | Twitter: @startreedata | YouTube: youtube.com/@StarTree | Blog: startree.ai/blog | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/startreedata/
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beth@winkowskipr.com
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