Announcing Starburst’s Community Forum

Starburst is excited to announce the launch of our community forum! Think of it as Stack Overflow meets an old-school web forum meets a rich repository of knowledge where you can find whatever you need to know about Starburst Galaxy, Starburst Enterprise, and Trino. It’s a great place to ask questions, share insights, showcase projects, and connect with a community that is using the same technology you are.

So what’s the goal of the forum? It serves as a public repository for information, help, and best practices about Starburst products and Trino. While Starburst support is always ready to lend a hand to customers, if you have a simple or generic question you may be able to already find the answer on the forum. Or if you are looking for advice from other Trino users, this is a great opportunity to post your questions around best practices. We, too, can appreciate the asynchronous experience of posting a topic and checking back later for answers with minimal human interaction. As the forum matures, it may be the case that your question has already been asked and answered before, making it an extremely valuable and easy-to-use resource. And sometimes you just want to ask a question to other users of our products.

The forum will also be more discoverable and communal than other sources of knowledge-sharing that exist in the Trino and Starburst spaces. While Slack and closed communication are great for individuals, they make it tough for the user community to learn from each other. Talks at conferences and events are great for those in attendance to learn how analytics are being run faster than ever, but it’s a lot of investment to watch every single talk and hope that some insights may apply to your use case. Slack doesn’t have a search engine indexing it, nor are you often going to find a pre-existing answer to your question even if it’s been asked and responded to a dozen times before. But with the Starburst forum, powered by Discourse, we have a knowledge base that is searchable, designed to surface relevant information, and steers you towards answers when you’re asking questions that have been asked before.

The forum is supported by the Starburst developer relations team, and we’ll be keeping an eye on every post and every topic, so you can know anything you post will be read and addressed. We’ll also be using a few accounts to periodically post useful information and highlights coming from elsewhere in the Starburst and Trino communities, which makes it a great resource to check on from time to time to see if there’s something new you can learn. One particular section to highlight is the “Showcase” category. If you’ve done something cool, interesting, or worth bragging about, post it there! We want to hear from you, and the community can benefit from your insights.

For those who have been paying extremely close attention, you may also be aware that the forum has some historical content from the “Trino forum” that preceded it, though the Trino forum was a standalone website that was not promoted nor monitored by Starburst, which left it relatively vacant. We’ve decided to move it on to the Starburst website, relaunch, expand to include Starburst-related topics, and invest in monitoring and responding to everything that pops up. So if you’re left wondering why there are questions and answers that are months old when we’re launching it today, that’s why!

Any questions about the forum? Hop on in and ask away.