Starburst Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Trino

Starburst Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Trino

Widely-adopted open source distributed SQL query engine enables thousands of organizations to accelerate data analytics

Boston, USA, August 8, 2022—Starburst, the analytics anywhere company, today celebrates the tenth anniversary of the open source SQL query engine Trino. Started as open source project Presto in 2012, Trino has grown into one of the most widely adopted open source projects of the last decade, with more than 5.9K stargazers on GitHub, up 269% since December 2020 when PrestoSQL rebranded to Trino, and thousands of global companies leveraging it to accelerate data analytics.

While Trino’s history began years before Starburst was founded, the two had been closely connected leading up to the launch of the company. Presto was first developed by Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, David Phillips, and Eric Hwang to address performance, scalability, and extensibility needs for Facebook analytics. By the fall of 2013, Presto was open sourced and adopted by major companies such as Netflix, LinkedIn, and Teradata.  

Soon after, Teradata’s Vice President and General Manager Justin Borgman, now Starburst’s co-founder and CEO, “started to fall in love with the [Presto] technology” and dedicated a team of 20 engineers to expand the project further. This Teradata team founded Starburst in 2017 to drive the success and adoption of Presto everywhere. 

“Starburst is thrilled to celebrate this major milestone with the community,” said Borgman. “In the same way that my co-founders set out to develop an open source project that would stand the test of time, we’re dedicated to maintaining the most fully-featured and easy-to-use offering of Trino for decades to come.” 

In 2018, Presto’s original founders left Facebook and forked the project under the new name PrestoSQL, which was later rebranded to Trino in 2020. Today, all of the co-founders are part of the Starburst team, and continue to drive Trino’s development. The co-founders are deeply involved with  Starburst Galaxy, a fully managed SaaS, which includes a free trial. Beyond the co-founders, the project is maintained by a burgeoning community of developers and contributors from many global companies including Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, and many more.

​”The monumental growth of the Trino project over the last 10 years speaks to the power and dedication of the Trino community in wanting to solve problems and build systems that last for decades into the future,” ​said Traverso, Trino and Presto Co-Creator and Starburst CTO. “The recent enhancements address the wide variety of problems that our community faces, such as unreliable hardware. It’s interesting to see the feature requests evolve and grow over time. We believe that this gives Trino, and ultimately Starburst, an advantage as we continue to grow the project in the direction the community deems  most important.”

Since the rebranding of PrestoSQL to Trino, the distributed SQL query engine community also continues to flourish. Community members and engagement metrics have grown significantly, with 57% more Slack members, 157% growth on Github, and 206% growth in YouTube subscribers. 

In October 2021, Starburst welcomed more than 1,000 attendees to the inaugural Trino Summit. This year, Trino Summit will be hosted as a hybrid event in San Francisco on November 10th, with Starburst acting as the lead sponsor. The call for speakers is open until September 15th, and registration is open with limited in-person seating. Starburst is also celebrating Trino’s 10-year anniversary with a Space Quest League Trino Birthday Challenge. By answering three SQL-based challenges correctly, contestants can win a free Trino birthday T-shirt. 

About Starburst

Starburst is the analytics engine for all your data. We provide the fastest, most efficient analytics engine for your data warehouse, data lake, or data mesh. We unlock the value of distributed data by making it fast and easy to access, no matter where it lives. Starburst queries data across any database, making it instantly actionable for data-driven organizations. With Starburst, teams can lower the total cost of their infrastructure and analytics investments, prevent vendor lock-in, and use the existing tools that work for their business. Trusted by companies like Comcast, FINRA, and Condé Nast, Starburst helps companies make better decisions faster on all data.