Understanding Trino and How It Powers Starburst Data

As organizations continue to adopt modern, decentralized data architectures, the need for powerful, flexible, and fast query engines has become more critical than ever. One of the leading technologies enabling this shift is Trino, the open-source distributed SQL query engine designed for querying large datasets across heterogeneous data sources.
But where does Starburst Data come into play? Let’s break it down.

What is Trino?

Trino is an open-source, distributed SQL query engine originally developed at Facebook under the name PrestoSQL. It was designed to enable fast, interactive analytics across a wide variety of data sources, including:

• Cloud object storage (e.g., Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Data Lake)
  Relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server)
• NoSQL systems (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB)
• Data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery)

Trino excels at federated querying, allowing users to join data across these disparate systems in real-time using standard ANSI SQL. Its architecture separates compute from storage and is built for high concurrency and low latency, making it ideal for interactive querying and large-scale data exploration.

Enter Starburst Data

While Trino is powerful on its own, Starburst Data enhances and extends Trino to meet the needs of enterprise environments. Starburst provides an enterprise-ready distribution of Trino with additional features around security, performance, and connectivity. It also offers commercial support and a managed SaaS version, Starburst Galaxy.

Key enhancements Starburst brings to Trino include:

• Enterprise Security: Fine-grained access controls, data masking, role-based access, and integration with enterprise identity systems.
• Performance Optimization: Advanced cost-based query optimization, smart caching, and built-in acceleration for commonly used queries.
• Connectors & Extensibility: A broader set of enterprise connectors and enhanced compatibility with more data sources.
• Observability & Governance: Built-in tools for query monitoring, usage auditing, and lineage tracking.
• Managed Services: Starburst Galaxy provides Trino as a fully managed SaaS platform with streamlined deployment and automated scaling.

Trino and Starburst: Better Together

At its core, Starburst is Trino. It stays closely aligned with the open-source project, and many of Starburst’s engineers are original creators and active contributors to Trino. This ensures that customers benefit from the latest innovations while also getting the enterprise-grade capabilities needed for production use.

By combining the power of Trino with Starburst’s robust enhancements and support, organizations can:

• Query data where it lives, avoiding costly and time-consuming data movement
• Simplify their data architecture with a single point of access across all sources
• Scale analytics across hundreds of users and petabytes of data
• Gain real-time insights across multi-cloud and hybrid environments

Conclusion

Trino is transforming the way companies think about data access and analytics, and Starburst Data is the bridge that brings Trino into the enterprise. Whether you're building a modern data lakehouse, implementing a data mesh, or just looking for a high-performance query engine for your data platform, Trino and Starburst offer a compelling solution.