Huge news for anyone building a Security Lakehouse.
Security data like logs, events, and telemetry from various sources (endpoints, cloud infra, SaaS ) is inherently semi-structured. A single security event might contain dozens of nested fields, which can change frequently with new product versions or changes to logging config.
Before Variant, handling this required kludgey workarounds:
👎 Storing all the JSON as a massive, opaque string. This is slow to query and wastes compute power.
👎 Trying to force a rigid schema on the data. This leads to brittle pipelines that constantly break when a new field appears.
The new Variant type solves this by providing a unified, open standard for storing this kind of data natively and efficiently within Parquet.
This means you can now:
🔥 Simplify Ingestion: Security pipelines become more resilient, as you don't need to preemptively flatten or strictly validate every piece of semi-structured data.
🔥Accelerate Investigations: You can query nested or evolving fields much faster without complex JSON parsing at query time. Quicker queries mean faster threat detection and response.
🔥Reduce Costs: More efficient storage and faster queries often translate directly into lower compute costs for your security platform.
This move brings the flexibility needed for modern security data alongside the high performance and open standards of the Lakehouse architecture.
Exciting news for the open data community: Variant, the native data type for semi-structured data, is now ratified in the Apache Parquet™ community — with support across Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg™, and Apache Spark™.
Variant brings a unified, open standard to how the lakehouse stores and queries flexible data—making it faster, simpler, and more consistent across formats and engines. https://lnkd.in/gESP97Nm
