Home > Workload Solutions > Data Analytics > Guides > Reference Architecture—Multicloud Data Analytics with Dell Technologies Powered by Starburst > How does Starburst work?
With Starburst you can execute queries against a single system or queries that are federated across multiple systems. Consider a sample query as follows:
SELECT * FROM sales_order, customer_db
WHERE sales_order.c_id = customer_db.c_id
Where sales_order and customer_db are tables in two different data sources. The Starburst query engine Coordinator uses various statistics and metadata to create an optimized query plan to execute the query. The query plan is then shared with the Worker nodes, that in turn access data sources using Connectors and execute the query. Worker nodes read data from the data sources for processing and might exercise pushdown operations when appropriate. The Coordinator finally collects the results from the Worker nodes and returns the final output.
In our architecture, we run coordinator and workers of Starburst Enterprise on Dell PowerEdge servers and use unstructured storage, such as Dell Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), for materialized views, data products, caching, and more. We configure a Hive Metastore instance to store the metadata of the materialized views and enable them through the Iceberg connector.