Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Dremio: your agents can query everything, but can you prove what they read?
Dremio calls itself "The Agentic Lakehouse". Under the branding, it's a good SQL engine. It reads Apache Iceberg tables. They sit in your own object store. It reaches across lakes, warehouses and day-to-day sources. No forced ETL, ever. Reflections make slow queries fast. Maersk runs 1.6 million queries a day on it. Dremio helped build Iceberg and Polaris. It earned that name. It didn't buy it.
We are not a query engine. We won't say we are one. We're the checked data plane instead. It covers the data sets agents touch. We tag fields against 129 PII, PHI, money and secret classes. We tokenize data sets at ingest. Agents then query tokenized data over MCP. Turning a token back into real data is a locked step. It's checked every time. We test each checked tool call against the agent's live access. That happens right before it runs. We then seal each checked call into a hash chain. You can check it yourself, any time. Most teams who talk to us keep their lakehouse. Below is the honest split. It names where Dremio wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- Someone will ask you to prove an agent's access log was not edited. A checker, an auditor, or Article 12 of the EU AI Act. Our chain answers with math. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's access mid-session. The very next tool call should fail. Not the next token swap.
- The agent should read a token, not a real medical record number. Tagging and tokenization happen first. That's before the model ever sees a value.
- The whole stack has to run on your own infrastructure, on keys you hold. You'd also like a price up front, before a call.
Pick Dremio when
- You hold petabytes in Iceberg. You need them queried fast. That's the job Dremio was built for. It's not one we do at all.
- You want to skip the ETL. One SQL layer across lake, warehouse and live sources is a real win. Reflections speed it up.
- You care about open table formats. Dremio co-founded Apache Polaris. It pushed Iceberg V3, with deletion vectors and row-level lineage. It also has an engineer on the ASF board.
- You run SAP. SAP said it will buy Dremio in May 2026. That feeds Business Data Cloud. So the roadmap is about to point straight at you.
Bottom line: Dremio makes your data easy to query. We make the regulated slice of it safe to query. We also keep proof of what happened. Those are two jobs, not one. A lot of buyers need both.
Feature by feature
Competitor cells state what Dremio's site, blog and press say. We use the date above. Did we get something wrong? Email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it, and credit you.
| What matters | DataShield | Dremio | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Query engine and lakehouse | Not our job. Ontology takes in, catalogs and shapes data sets. It runs DuckDB over Parquet for stats on masked golden views. That's a data set platform, not a broad engine over your lake. | The core product, and it's strong. Iceberg-native SQL, federation with no forced ETL, Reflections for speed. Also Iceberg V3, with deletion vectors and clustering. | ◇ |
| Audit evidence | A SHA-256 hash chain, with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. Those checkpoints are chained too. A check comes back clean, or flagged. It names the exact break: insert, delete or a cut. Try the verifier. | Lineage tracking of which sources an agent touched. Also which rules applied. Handy. We found no tamper-proof claim over that record. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every checked tool call passes a scope ceiling. Also a consented-tool allowlist, and an access tier. Plus a fresh pull check. That happens before dispatch. It fails closed. | Agents inherit the user's ID, plus their RBAC and FGAC. Their own words: a hidden column stays hidden over MCP too. Good design. It's still one call, made at grant time. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed access, just for a crisis, just for agents. Admin plus IP allowlist plus step-up. It auto-revokes on its own. It can't be quietly wiped from the log. | Not in their public docs at all. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-person key parts. Plus ISO 27560 signed consent receipts. The audit chain still checks out. That holds even once the subject is gone. | Iceberg V3 row-level lineage helps you find and rewrite rows. The erasure method itself isn't in the docs. Neither is the effect on old logs. | ◆ |
| Tokenization | Fixed, join-safe, vault-reversible tokens at ingest. Plus broad bands for quasi-IDs. Dates become year, decade or age band. ZIPs become 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs and emails get part masked. Each column gets a risk score. Detokenization stays locked. We log every use. | Row and column filters by rule. Tokenization isn't a word Dremio uses. The agent sees real values. Just the ones it's let to see. | ◆ |
| PII and PHI classification | 129 field classes cover PII, PHI, money data and secrets. That's all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor IDs. Plus eight non-US national ID formats. Regex plus checksum checks: Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN, GTIN. Plus column-name lists and anti-pattern filters. No model runs here, so calls repeat from a config digest. Shipped just now, and we say so. | Auto-built wikis and labels for oversight. Also a semantic layer with business context. That's a metadata note. It's not field-level tagging, with a risk level and a rule tie. | ◆ |
| Semantic layer | A business glossary, built from entity types. Typed lineage paths, with per-hop access gating. Also a 29-step steward flow. Narrower than theirs, and aimed at oversight, not BI modeling. | The AI Semantic Layer is a real asset. It's pitched as a living guide for the business. That way agents ask better questions. Years of modeling work sit behind it. | ◇ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. More than 200 tools. Tool tokens carry scope ceilings. Per-call logs tie back to the agent. RFC 8693 delegation locks a scope ceiling on behalf-of calls too. | A hosted MCP server, GA on Dremio Cloud since November 2025. OAuth 2.0, query and pattern tools, semantic feeds and guided prompts. Shipping, and in buyers' hands. That counts. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or room. Or on a single-tenant box we run for you. Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse. Guardian checks a signed deploy file first. Ed25519 audit-signing keys sit on your box. You hold the key folder. Keys turn over by kid. It fails closed on an unknown key. KMS or HSM custody is a built gap in Auth. It's not a shipped link. HMAC tokenization keys sit as files on your box today. Not in a KMS. | Dremio Cloud is AWS only. Dremio lists Azure as coming soon. You self-run Dremio Enterprise: on Kubernetes, on your own box or any cloud. There's also a free Community build. For a local machine or box. | ◈ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live and in use. Guardian and Lighthouse have run since April 2026. SOC 2 is not yet in place, and we say so. Small team. Design-partner terms include source escrow. | Founded 2015, close to $385M raised, thousands of buyers. Amazon and Shell and Maersk sit on the logo wall. Also an ASF board seat. SAP is buying them. That cuts both ways. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published price, a quick quote. No sales wall. | Half public. Dremio Cloud is $0.20 per DCU, with a $400 trial credit for 30 days. Dremio Enterprise, the self-run tier, is quote only. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Dremio leads◈ comparable
We draw Dremio claims from dremio.com. Also its price page and its MCP blog post. Plus its own press notes. Last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below, not just from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from a lakehouse engine
Proof that survives an audit
Lineage tells you what an agent read. It doesn't tell you no one edited the record. Ours is a hash chain, with signed checkpoints. The verifier names what broke, not just that it did. That's the trait reviewers ask about. Think EU AI Act Article 12, HIPAA §164.312(b). Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that can change mid-flight
An analyst quits on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. It's still running under their old rights. We check the next checked tool call against live access. It fails closed. Inherited rights alone wait for the next token. How Auth does it.
A token instead of a real value
Rights decide if an agent sees a column. Tokenization decides what's in it. Our tokens are fixed and join-safe, so analysis still works. A flip back is a locked vault step, with its own log line. What Ontology does at ingest.
Where Dremio is genuinely stronger
Start with the build itself. Dremio has been at Iceberg since before it was cool. It co-founded Apache Polaris. It pushed Iceberg V3 into its cloud in April 2026. That brought deletion vectors and row-level lineage. It also has an engineer on the Apache Software Foundation board. That's not a marketing pose. It's a decade of real code work. The scale numbers are public and clear. Maersk runs 1.6 million queries a day. RWE runs 400,000. Dremio has hosted its MCP server for Cloud buyers since November 2025. It carries OAuth 2.0 and inherited access rules. That's a sane build. It shipped before ours did on that front. SAP's May 2026 deal gives them a wide sales path. We will never match it.
Here's the push-back, kept narrow on purpose. Dremio's agent answer is inherited rights. The agent borrows the human's rights. Dremio logs the lineage. That's the right default, and it solves the easy half. It doesn't tag which columns hold protected health data. It doesn't swap a value for a token. Not before a model reads it. It doesn't re-check access on the call now in flight. And the record it leaves is a log. The answer to "prove this was not changed" becomes a policy paper. Not a signed proof. Gartner expects most bad agent moves through 2028 to be inside jobs. Policy slips, not outside attacks. Inherited rights plus an editable log is the weak spot here. It's also the first thing regulated buyers ask about.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered. If we were the ones buying. Ask them on every call, ours included.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes. Each record ties to the one before it. Checkpoints are Ed25519-signed and chained. A check tells deletion apart from a cut, and from a tamper. Try it on a sample chain at /verify. Dremio: their MCP post lists full lineage tracking. Of sources, changes and rules. We found no tamper-proof method over it. Ask them if that lineage record is append-only. Ask if anyone outside Dremio can check it.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
We re-check access on each checked tool call. Revocation lands on the next call. Dremio says agents inherit user ID. Access rules follow on their own. OAuth tokens pass through credential handoff to each source. That's clean at grant time. Ask how long a token stays live. After you cut off the human. Ask if a query already in flight stops.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
We crypto-shred the per-person key parts. That makes each ciphertext for that person unreadable at once. It also sends an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor names in the chain carry HMAC locks. The proof still checks out. Dremio ships Iceberg V3 row-level lineage. It helps you find and rewrite rows. What happens to the query history isn't in the docs. Neither is the lineage record. Ask for the method, not the flow.
Is DataShield a lakehouse? Do we drop Dremio?
No, and probably not. We don't query your Iceberg tables. We have no Reflections. We'll lose any speed test you care to run. Ontology is a data set platform. It takes in, catalogs, tags, tokenizes, links records, snapshots. It serves agents over MCP. Keep the lakehouse for stats at scale. Put the data sets agents touch under us. The ones with names and health facts in them.
SAP is buying Dremio. Does that matter?
It's fair to weigh, and it's not a rumor. Dremio said so on 4 May 2026, terms undisclosed, close set for Q3 2026. If you run SAP, this is good news. The roadmap is about to serve you. If you don't, ask for a written roadmap. Ask for a price hold too, for the next 24 months. Ask what happens to Dremio Cloud as a standalone product too. Deals change packaging before they change code.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
Not yet, and we won't say otherwise. Auth is live. It ships with a public threat model. Also a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have been live since April 2026. We found no SOC 2, HIPAA or ISO mark for Dremio either. So ask us both the same question, and ask for the report. Our details sit on the security page.
- Dremio's current positioning: "The Agentic Lakehouse. The only lakehouse built for agents, managed by agents," with pillars including "End-to-End Access Control" and "AI agents inherit user identity and access controls automatically." - dremio.com, 13 Sep 2026
- Agentic Lakehouse launch: native MCP support for any MCP-enabled agent from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google; autonomous materializations, clustering and auto-generated wikis and labels. - Dremio press release, 13 Nov 2025
- Dremio MCP Server: OAuth 2.0, query and pattern-analysis tools, semantic resources, guided prompts; "if a user can't see certain columns or rows in the Dremio UI, they won't see them through the MCP Server either." - Dremio blog, checked 13 Sep 2026
- SAP to acquire Dremio to unify SAP and non-SAP data for agentic AI. Terms undisclosed, expected to close Q3 2026. - Dremio newsroom, 4 May 2026
- Iceberg V3 support in Dremio Cloud: deletion vectors, VARIANT type, and row-level lineage for regulated industries; Apache Polaris graduated to top-level project status. - Dremio newsroom, 10 Apr 2026
- Pricing: Dremio Cloud at $0.20 per DCU with a $400 credit for 30 days, AWS today and Azure coming soon; Dremio Enterprise self-managed is quote only; a free Community Edition runs on a local machine or server. - dremio.com/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
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