Introduction

Open Source (AGPL V3)

Beacon is open source under the AGPL V3 license. Source code and contributions: github.com/maris-development/beacon

Beacon is a data lakehouse query engine built for scientific datasets. Point it at your existing files — on disk or in S3 — and it exposes a SQL query API instantly, with no data migration or preprocessing required.

Clients query Beacon using SQL or JSON and receive results as a file (Parquet, NetCDF, Arrow IPC, …) or a streaming Arrow IPC response. Beacon handles filtering, aggregation, and joins across files entirely server-side.

Supported formats

Format	Notes
NetCDF	.nc, .nc4, .cdf
Zarr	v2 and v3
Parquet	Native columnar, Hive partitioning supported
GeoTIFF / COG	Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF supported
ODV ASCII	Ocean Data View spreadsheet format
CSV	Header row required, delimiter configurable
Arrow IPC	.arrow, .ipc stream files
Beacon Binary Format	Beacon's native ingest format

How it fits together

                    Clients
           (notebooks · apps · scripts)
                       |
                  SQL / JSON
                       |
                       v
               +---------------+
               |    Beacon     |
               | query engine  |
               +-------+-------+
                       |
           +-----------+-----------+
           |                       |
           v                       v
    Local files               S3 / Object Store
    (NetCDF, Zarr, …)         (existing bucket)
           |                       |
           +-----------+-----------+
                       |
                       v
              Result returned to client
              (Parquet · NetCDF · Arrow)