Dremio
activeby Dremio (SAP) · since 2017
Iceberg-native lakehouse query engine with reflections for acceleration, owned by SAP since 2026.
Overview
Dremio is a lakehouse SQL engine built on Apache Arrow: it queries Iceberg, Delta and Parquet on object storage plus federated sources, and accelerates dashboards with 'reflections', automatically maintained materializations that the optimizer substitutes transparently. Its catalog is based on Apache Polaris, and it offers semantic layer and AI features. SAP completed its acquisition of Dremio in July 2026 to make SAP Business Data Cloud Iceberg-native. The open-source community edition repository has not been updated since September 2025, so new adopters should expect a commercial, SAP-aligned product.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- +Reflections accelerate BI without users changing queries
- +Arrow-based engine with Arrow Flight for fast client transfer
- +Strong Apache Iceberg support including DML and time travel
- +Federates lakes with relational and NoSQL sources
- +Semantic layer for governed, shareable datasets
Trade-offs
- −Open-source edition effectively frozen since 2025
- −Future roadmap now driven by SAP's priorities
- −Reflection management adds storage and refresh overhead
- −Smaller community than Trino or Spark
Great for
- +Iceberg lakehouse BI acceleration
- +Semantic layer over a data lake
- +SAP-centric data platforms
- +Warehouse offload
Think twice for
- −OLTP
- −Teams requiring an actively developed open-source engine
- −Real-time streaming analytics
Capabilities
Native or official first-party support · 8 of 25 tracked
Scale & consistency
- Comfortable data size
- Large · ≤ 1 PB
- Horizontal scaling
- Native
- Multi-region
- No
- Transactions
- Limited ACID
- Consistency
- Strong
- Schema
- Strict
- Architecture
- Distributed, Shared storage, Client server
- Query languages
- SQL
Coordinator and executor nodes with elastic engines; data stays in object storage.
Deployment
available on · AWS · Azure
Ecosystem
Alternatives to Dremio
Fast distributed SQL query engine for federated analytics across lakes and databases.
dremio vs trino →Commercial Trino platform: self-managed Starburst Enterprise and the Starburst Galaxy SaaS.
dremio vs starburst →Serverless SQL warehouses on the Databricks lakehouse, powered by the Photon C++ engine.
dremio vs databricks-sql →Fully managed cloud data warehouse with separate storage and compute, now spanning AI and apps.
dremio vs snowflake →Serverless AWS query service running Trino-based SQL directly over data in S3.
dremio vs amazon-athena →Distributed SQL query engine from Meta for interactive queries over data lakes and many sources.
dremio vs presto →Dremio FAQ
What is Dremio?
Dremio is a relational database by Dremio (SAP), first released in 2017. Dremio is a lakehouse SQL engine built on Apache Arrow: it queries Iceberg, Delta and Parquet on object storage plus federated sources, and accelerates dashboards with 'reflections', automatically maintained materializations that the optimizer substitutes transparently. Its catalog is based on Apache Polaris, and it offers semantic layer and AI features. SAP completed its acquisition of Dremio in July 2026 to make SAP Business Data Cloud Iceberg-native. The open-source community edition repository has not been updated since September 2025, so new adopters should expect a commercial, SAP-aligned product.
Is Dremio open source?
No. Dremio is proprietary, closed-source software.
Does Dremio support ACID transactions?
Partly. Dremio offers limited ACID guarantees (for example, single-record or single-partition transactions), with strong consistency.
Does Dremio scale horizontally?
Dremio scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at large scale (≤ 1 PB).
How can I run Dremio?
You can self-host it and use the vendor's managed cloud. It is available on AWS and Azure.
What is Dremio best for?
Dremio is a strong fit for iceberg lakehouse BI acceleration, semantic layer over a data lake and SAP-centric data platforms. Think twice for OLTP.
What are the best alternatives to Dremio?
Common alternatives to Dremio include Trino, Starburst, Databricks SQL, Snowflake and Amazon Athena. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.
How popular is Dremio?
Dremio ranks #262 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (12.7/100), and #82 among relational databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.