Big data company Quoble has made the leap to serverless by unleashing Quantum on their customers. The serverless SQL engine for the company’s data platform is meant to let data analysts query object stores on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud with ANSI-SQL.

While this might not sound like big news to some, it is worth noting that Quoble is the company of Ashish Thusoo. Thusoo knows a thing or two about big data since he not only ran the data infrastructure team at Facebook, but also created data warehousing software Apache Hive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that companies such as Oracle and Expedia are amongst the users of Quoble’s offerings, which makes Quantum at least noteworthy.

According to a technical overview of the product, most Quoble customers use custom metastores in the cloud. This is something other serverless SQL offerings don’t really take into account, if you ask Quoble. Quantum was therefore built to support different stores which also means easy onboarding, since users don’t have to recreate schemas or table metadata to get started.

This all fits in perfectly with the company’s vision of eliminating “any administrator intervention to manage the environment — but without comprising the fine-grained operational control should they need it for specific use cases” Thusoo points out in the product’s announcement.  

He also lists an algorithm to estimate and allocate features, autoscaling, the possibility of  switching between managed and serverless mode and flexibility of access as the project’s main features. On top of that Quantum is meant to offer enterprise grade security, encryption, and protection as well as multi-statement support and infrastructure monitoring.

The promise of only paying for queries run is also in there, but that’s more of a given to anyone who looked into serverless before. Quantum pricing is based on the amount of data read/scanned in a query. More information can be found on the company’s blog.