Best Free Query Engines

StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot™, is a fully managed real-time analytics platform built for customer-facing applications that demand instant insights on the freshest data. Unlike traditional data warehouses or OLTP databases—optimized for back-office reporting or transactions—StarTree is engineered for real-time OLAP at true scale, meaning: - Data Volume: query performance sustained at petabyte scale - Ingest Rates: millions of events per second, continuously indexed for freshness - Concurrency: thousands to millions of simultaneous users served with sub-second latency With StarTree, businesses deliver always-fresh insights at interactive speed, enabling applications that personalize, monitor, and act in real time.

Tabular is an open table store from the creators of Apache Iceberg. Connect multiple computing engines and frameworks. Decrease query time and storage costs by up to 50%. Centralize enforcement of data access (RBAC) policies. Connect any query engine or framework, including Athena, BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, Spark, and Python. Smart compaction, clustering, and other automated data services reduce storage costs and query times by up to 50%. Unify data access at the database or table. RBAC controls are simple to manage, consistently enforced, and easy to audit. Centralize your security down to the table. Tabular is easy to use plus it features high-powered ingestion, performance, and RBAC under the hood. Tabular gives you the flexibility to work with multiple “best of breed” compute engines based on their strengths. Assign privileges at the data warehouse database, table, or column level.

R2 SQL is Cloudflare’s serverless, distributed analytics query engine (currently in open beta) that enables you to run SQL queries over Apache Iceberg tables stored in R2 Data Catalog without needing to manage your own compute clusters. It is built to efficiently query large volumes of data by leveraging metadata pruning, partition-level statistics, file and row-group filtering, and Cloudflare’s globally distributed compute infrastructure to parallelize execution. The system works by integrating with R2 object storage and an Iceberg catalog layer, so you can ingest data via Cloudflare Pipelines into Iceberg tables, and then query that data with minimal overhead. Queries can be issued via the Wrangler CLI or HTTP API (with an API token granting permissions across R2 SQL, Data Catalog, and storage). During the open beta period, using R2 SQL itself is not billed, only storage and standard R2 operations incur charges.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows your entire organization to use data and AI. It’s built on a lakehouse to provide an open, unified foundation for all data and governance, and is powered by a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the uniqueness of your data. The winners in every industry will be data and AI companies. From ETL to data warehousing to generative AI, Databricks helps you simplify and accelerate your data and AI goals. Databricks combines generative AI with the unification benefits of a lakehouse to power a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the unique semantics of your data. This allows the Databricks Platform to automatically optimize performance and manage infrastructure in ways unique to your business. The Data Intelligence Engine understands your organization’s language, so search and discovery of new data is as easy as asking a question like you would to a coworker.