Backed by industry heavyweights such as Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber, the Presto Foundation, which is a data query engine, has joined the Linux Foundation.
Presto was first developed at Facebook in 2012 as a high performance distributed SQL query engine for large-scale data analytics. Alibaba, Twitter and Uber are also listed as founding members who together will help drive the future direction of the project in order to push Presto to become the fastest and most reliable SQL engine for large, distributed data processing.
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Presto’s architecture allows users to query a variety of data sources such as Hadoop, S3, Alluxio, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, MongoDB and move at scale and speed. It solves the problem of having to choose between having fast analytics that use an expensive commercial solution, or using a slow but "free" solution that require excessive hardware.
Presto is a distributed system designed to run on large clusters of machines. It can query data where it is stored without needing to move the data to a separate system. Its in-memory and distributed query processing results in query latency of seconds to minutes.
“At Facebook alone, over a thousand employees use Presto, running several million queries and processing petabytes of data per day. After creating Presto we open sourced it to see if other companies were having the same issues and wanted to collaborate. It turns out many other companies were interested, and so under The Linux Foundation, we believe the project can engage others and grow the community for the benefit of all.” said Kathy Kam, head of open source at Facebook.
Like other members of the Linux Foundation, the Presto Foundation will operate under a community governance model with representation from each of the founding members. The collaboration under the Linux Foundation's roof will enable a broader ecosystem and more contributors that will collectively drive the development and use of Presto.
“Uber’s data platform architecture uses Presto to extract critical insights from aggregated data, which helps us build better products for our customers,” says Uber's Brian Hsieh, head of open source, in a statement. “Uber is honored to partner with the Linux Foundation and major contributors from the tech community to bring the Presto Foundation to life. Our goal is to help create an open and collaborative community in which Presto developers can thrive.”