Case Study: Optum achieves 10X faster queries with Starburst Enterprise

Optum Accelerates Queries by 10x With Starburst Enterprise

Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, needed a faster, more secure way to give more than 10,000 users access to distributed healthcare data spread across a PB-scale Hadoop data lake and multiple databases, including SAS, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, and Postgres. Its existing Hive and Spark SQL environment couldn’t deliver ad hoc queries quickly enough, scale efficiently, or provide PHI access controls at the level the business required. Starburst Data, using Starburst Enterprise, was chosen to help solve these challenges.

With Starburst Data’s Starburst Enterprise deployed on-prem in Kubernetes, Optum gained a single, secure point of access to query data where it resides without ETL or data duplication. The results were significant: ad hoc queries ran 10X faster than Hive and 2X to 3X faster than Spark, with some queries dropping from more than five minutes to under 10 seconds, while infrastructure resource use fell by 30%. Optum also expects $8M in long-run savings, alongside better consistency, improved retention and satisfaction, and simpler centralized security management.

Optum

Mike Prior

Principal IO Engineer