Trino Champions

Madhan Neethiraj is a senior principal engineer at Cloudera, focusing on software development in the security and governance area. He has been contributing to open source for over 10 years, and is a founding member of the Apache Ranger and Apache Atlas projects. His experience includes working at startups and large companies like Microsoft and Oracle.

Madhan Neethiraj has demonstrated his dedication to the Trino community through tackling a notable and challenging addition to the Apache Ranger and Trino communities as his first Trino contribution. With lots of community collaboration and enthusiasm, Madhan co-authored the Apache Ranger access control plugin to control data access in Trino using Apache Ranger policies – including support for operations on catalogs, schemas, tables, columns, as well  row-filtering, column-masking and audit logging.  We look forward to many more community contributions from Madhan!

Sebastian’s first contribution to Trino consisted of adding a configuration to disable caching of Delta Lake transaction logs when file system caching is enabled. This was a jumping-off point for Sebastian. Since then he made several awesome contributions to the Trino Helm chart – from small bug fixes of the JMX Exporter container port spec, to default TPC-H and TPC-DS catalog configurations, to adding templating support for `additionalConfigFiles`. This allows users to define their own configurations and transform them as needed. Sebastian has been a rockstar in the Trino community with these contributions and his interactions on GitHub and Slack.  Thank you for your work on enabling even more features such as graceful worker shutdown, adding network policy protection support to Trino pods, and numerous others that are still in the pipeline!

Star Poon is a notable contributor to the Trino community in Japan, working as a big data platform engineer at LY Corporation. His team offers Trino as a serverless analytics service, enabling various service teams to effortlessly analyze data. Star manages multiple Trino clusters to meet diverse requirements and is implementing the Trino gateway to further enhance user experience. Actively involved in Trino gateway development, Star is dedicated to collaborating with contributors from different companies to strengthen the Trino and Trino gateway community, aiming to drive innovation and growth.

Yes, Jan works at Starburst, but you can’t deny the work that he’s done above and beyond his day job in supporting Trino.  His key contributions to the Go client, Grafana connector, and much more has established him as a key part of the Trino project and community.

Jan contributed 6 SQL routine examples, two of which can be seen now in the Trino docs.  His first example truncates long strings of over 60 characters into a summarized format containing the beginning and end of the string, making the results much more readable.

His second contribution adds formatting that is currently not available in Trino’s format_number() function which currently does not support bytes.  His example here shows how to format large values of bytes into readable strings using a SQL routine.

You can find Jan hanging out in the Trino slack for any questions.

Peng Wei is a member of the large and growing Trino community in China. Specifically, he looks after a data platform with Trino and Spark at a company in the financial services industry in Shanghai. His work takes him beyond his significant knowledge of Java backend application development into the world of big data analytics. His team looks after a number of Trino clusters for their analytics users, and as an active member of the Trino Slack community, he learned about the new Trino Gateway and how it can help with multiple clusters.

Like others, he noticed that the user interface of Trino Gateway was old and clunky. However, as a true champion, he did not see this as a flaw, but rather an opportunity to learn more about frontend development and improve the UI. He quickly realized that a new UI built from scratch would be even better, and he did not shy away from the massive task of building it. After numerous hours of learning, hacking, and troubleshooting, he was able to submit a pull request with a new, improved UI he’d created, much to the surprise and delight of the Trino community. Peng says the interaction on the PR was quite welcoming, and the smooth process resulted in some minor further improvements before it was shipped and launched with the newest Trino Gateway release. He finds it very fulfilling to know that users can now enjoy a much better user experience, and he is looking forward to submitting more improvements in the future. 

As an avid Apache Maven developer, Tamas may seem like a strange choice for Trino Champion, but his contributions highlight the openness and flexibility of the Trino project and its collaboration with other projects. Not surprisingly, Tamas’ work focused on the Apache Maven aspects of the Trino build, and he made general updates to the build health, removing and updating deprecated plugins along with introducing some of the latest Maven 3.9.x features:

• Concurrent local repository (AKA repo locking) to ensure the local repo can be shared safely across multiple processes of Maven.
• Remote repository filtering (RRF) to ensure more efficient and accurate artifact retrieval.

Overall, Tamas has done a great job ensuring that the Trino and Maven communities benefit from each others’ efforts and experience. As a project which relies on many other tools, libraries, and technologies, Trino has always strived to be open and collaborative and Tamas’ impact on the project is a good example.

When asked about his experience working with the Trino community, Tamas said:

Trino developers are very open, collaborative and interested in new things. Most importantly (I am biased), they are similar to the kind of Maven users that proactively keep up with things. They are not having their build “set in stone” as many projects I see.

For his contributions, Tamas will be getting the Trino Champions swag pack which contains things that he will hopefully use to represent Trino in his free time, hiking and biking around his current home country of Denmark.

Our first Trino Champion, Kevin Liu, is a Software Engineer at Stripe and a very active Trino community member, having presented on Trino and Iceberg at our last Trino Fest. 

For his SQL routine example, Kevin took on the notoriously annoying task of parsing date strings. His routine makes a best effort to identify the date format being used in the string then converts it to the TIMESTAMP WITH TIMEZONE format. A very cool example highlighting a very useful use case.

Check out the code in the Trino docs here.

Find Kevin on LinkedIn here or say hello to him in the Trino Slack.