Dremio has clearly set themselves up for a moonshot in terms of the quality of their product and its amazing capabilities. Call me a fan—it’s an excellent piece of software and It’s solved a ton of problems for our organization’s data management needs.
That being said, there is a definite target market for all of this spectacular software, and it’s not the company I work for, which is a medium-sized independent ad agency of about 160 employees. They’re out for some serious corporate money. For our company and specific use case (on-premise, isolated, multiple boutique-scale client data platform instances) the mid-5-figure “startup” license and 6-figure-for-starters regular licenses were… shall we say… astronomical.
Luckily, the Dremio-OSS software is quite adequate for our needs and, with some creative system administration, is securable inside an LDAP auth framework and is easy to scale into a platform that readily handles hundreds of millions of rows on some very lightweight infrastructure.