BeaconA modern open-source data lakehouse for scientific data

Manage, query, and serve climate and scientific datasets from S3 Buckets, or local storage through SQL and JSON APIs.

time	latitude	longitude	temperature
2024-01-03	36.21	-5.43	21.8
2024-01-03	35.88	-6.10	22.4
2024-01-04	37.02	-4.77	20.9
2024-01-04	36.55	-5.92	23.1
2024-01-05	35.40	-6.58	22.0

executing…

Supported formats

ZarrParquetTIFFNetCDFCSVODVArrow

Works withDataGripDBeaverJDBCArrow Flight SQLPythonDaskJupyter Notebooks

Deploy Beacon anywhere

☁️Cloud (AWS)

💻Jupyterremote notebook

SQL / Flight SQL

Beaconon EC2

reads via S3 API

🪣S3 Bucketobject storage

Managed cloud — Beacon on EC2, data in S3.

🖥️On-premise

💻Jupyterremote notebook

SQL / Flight SQL

Beaconyour server

reads local files

💾Local diskNetCDF · Parquet

Self-hosted — Beacon and data on one server.

💻Local

📓Jupytersame machine

localhost

Beaconlocalhost:5001

reads local files

💾Local fileson disk

All on one machine — ideal for development.

Built for scientific data

Serve your existing NetCDF, Zarr, Parquet and more as-is — fast, standards-based SQL, fully open source.

🚀

Fast analytical queries

Built in Rust with Apache Arrow and DataFusion, Beacon is designed for efficient filtering, projection, and retrieval across large scientific datasets.

🧩

Works with existing formats

Query NetCDF, Zarr, Parquet, CSV, ODV, Arrow, TIFF, Atlas and BBF datasets without converting everything into a proprietary warehouse.

🧱

Create tables and views

Define external tables over existing files, create reusable SQL views, and expose curated datasets to downstream users and applications.

🔌

SQL and JSON APIs

Serve scientific data through queryable SQL and JSON interfaces for portals, dashboards, notebooks, services, and data products.

🧭

Query from your favorite tools

Use Arrow Flight SQL to connect Beacon to JDBC-compatible SQL clients such as DataGrip and DBeaver, or query datasets directly through JSON APIs.

🤝

Open source and self-hosted

Beacon is available under the AGPL-3.0 license, giving teams full control over deployment, data access, and infrastructure.

Get started in minutes

Run Beacon with Docker, point it at your files, and query over SQL or JSON.

docker pull ghcr.io/maris-development/beacon:latest

Get started View on GitHub