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Redshift catalogs and SSH tunnels for Starburst Galaxy

Usage of Starburst Galaxy is really picking up. We had a great demo session at the recent Datanova event, where the attendees spun up hundreds of clusters. The new users love the experience, and bring new demands to us. Our always-productive product and engineering teams are ready to help, and today we are providing two great new features in the latest production deployment of Starburst Galaxy.

Redshift catalogs

We are moving another step forward in our mission to enable data analysis and unlock all your data, no matter where it is stored. It is time to query all the data in Amazon Redshift with our new support for Redshift catalogs. Configuration is similar to the existing catalogs: create the new catalog, add to a cluster, and start writing SQL to query your Redshift cluster. You can even combine it with data from another catalog in a federated query.

SSH tunnels

A common problem faced by customers are locked-away databases. Sure, your PostgreSQL or MySQL database is deployed and managed in the cloud. But that doesn’t mean just anybody can access it. It is safely tucked away in your virtual private cloud (VPC), and any attempt to query it with a catalog from Starburt Galaxy is bound to fail.

And now we have a solution for that. SSH tunnels to the rescue! By placing a bastion host server within the VPC of your database and cloud provider, you can create an SSH tunnel. The bastion host is configured to allow Starburst Galaxy access from outside. All network traffic goes through SSH to the bastion host, and to the database host inside the VPC. With permission for the bastion host to connect to the database, you can now query the database even though it is located inside the VPC, and get your query results in Starburst Galaxy running outside the VPC. SSH ensures all traffic is encrypted.

With this release SSH tunneling through bastion hosts is supported for MySQL and PostgreSQL catalogs.

We have a lot more in the pipeline, so watch this space for more announcements.

Bob and Manfred