Query-as-a-Service and why and you want it
Just as many other areas of our technological life are being turned into services — to consume without needing to install, configure and manage infrastructure and software, RAW Labs have developed a new capability which we call “Query-as-a-Service” or QaaS for short.
QaaS is a fully managed, smart query service built on our unique technology platform which enables users to query petabytes of diverse data in place, so it’s massively scalable and runs in a secure and containerised environment on public cloud infrastructure.
QaaS allows users to ask questions on disparate data sources without needing to know how the data is stored, in which format, or which database dialect to use, without needing to worry about where it is physically located and crucially without having to set up infrastructure in order to execute the query.
This saves you needing to create and manage a big data query infrastructure, for example a Presto or a Spark cluster. In some instances it can remove the need for a data lake too, for instance where the original sources of data have accessible history, or where you just need a smarter data cache. We can think of this use of RAW as a virtual data lake technology, however the capabilities go a long way beyond a simple data lake.
QaaS combines data sources, optimizes data access and intelligently caches as necessary behind the scenes so that the results are returned quickly and the execution path is as optimal as possible. It does this because we designed the RAW Platform differently. We call this “NoDB”: a set of related inventions based on research at EPFL in Switzerland. Read our Founders Story for more details.
Because our QaaS uses state-of-the-art inferencing on all data that is subject to a query, there are no schemas, mappings to maintain, and hence less code in general, without need to create external scripts with glue-code, functions, and because it doesn’t move the data (no ETL) it reduces risk from data copies. Much more agile. Much less cost and risk.
Use Python libraries? No problem: RAW Query Language allows you to integrate Python into your code, and vice versa. Want to serve the results up as queryable web services ? Yes it does that too, automatically.
Our RAW Query Language is a single SQL-like functional language to allow you to exploit many types of data with a single familiar syntax. If you know SQL then you can easily learn the additions for nested structures, functions, packages and we support standard ANSI SQL so that you can get started immediately too. It’s simple, incredibly powerful, and can do more complex manipulation.
Try our solution today at https://raw-labs.com/
Jeremy Posner, VP Product and Services, RAW Labs SA
