Starburst is thrilled to wish Trino a very happy tenth birthday! We have lots of reasons to celebrate, most importantly because we at Starburst owe our existence to the project we know as Trino today.
10 years ago, Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, David Phillips, and Eric Hwang created Presto, the massively parallel processing SQL engine to address performance, scalability, and extensibility needs for Facebook analytics. By the fall of 2013, Presto was released as open source software, and gained the interest of other popular companies such as Netflix, LinkedIn, and Teradata.
While Trino’s history begins a while before Starburst entered the scene, the two have been tightly intertwined even before the creation of the company. In 2010, Justin Borgman, Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, and Daniel Abadi founded Hadapt, which introduced the concept of “SQL-on-Hadoop”. The Hadapt team was working on solving the problem of analytics at scale and continued that work at Teradata once Teradata purchased Hadapt in 2014.
In 2015, the Teradata VP focusing on emerging technologies, also known as the current Starburst co-founder and CEO Justin Borgman, “started to fall in love with the [Presto] technology”. Teradata dedicated a group of individuals to essentially expand the project further by contributing security and ecosystem integrations that made the project even more attractive to enterprise users.
This Teradata team started Starburst in 2017 with the intent of creating a Presto enterprise offering. While the original Presto founders continued to work on the project at Facebook, their commitment to the Presto community ultimately led them to leave Facebook in 2018 when it seemed this commitment was no longer being respected. The co-founders forked the project under the new name PrestoSQL, and a year of community work later Martin, Dain, and David joined Starburst.
Since then, Eric has also joined Starburst and the four Presto co-founders have reunited. Working alongside them are other brilliant top contributors and top committers who have years of experience working on the project. PrestoSQL was rebranded to Trino in 2020, and since then the entire community has flourished under its new name, including the adorable mascot Commander Bun Bun. Starburst is dedicated to growing, enriching, and supporting the Trino community. Our open core business is reliant on continuing to develop these principles. Just like the Trino co-founders intended to create and foster a successful multi-decade project, Starburst intends to be the best enterprise offering of Trino. So, today we are celebrating. We are celebrating the Trino community, a decade of query innovation, and all the contributions that occurred to make Trino awesome and widely adopted across the globe. We at Starburst feel proud of the part we have played to help Trino become the mature project it is today, including the innovations we have contributed ourselves and those created in collaboration with our ecosystem partners.
Celebrate with us by completing our Space Quest League Trino Birthday Challenge. Answer three short SQL-based challenges correctly, and win a free Trino 10th Birthday t-shirt!
If you want to learn even more about Trino, sign up for the hybrid 2022 Trino Summit where Starburst is excited to act as the lead sponsor. If you have a talk you’d like to give around Trino, the call for speakers is open until September 15. If you or your company are interested in working alongside Starburst to create this awesome event, reach out to the Starburst events team.
Join the Trino community:
- Join the Trino Slack workspace
- Watch the Trino Community Broadcast
- Subscribe to the Trino YouTube channel
- Follow us on the trinodb Twitter account
- Give us a star on the Trino GitHub repository
- Follow us on the Trino Linkedin account
