Even though data is at the epicenter of decision-making in enterprises, its accessibility continues to be a burning issue.

By connecting different data sources simultaneously, Trino — a high-performance, distributed SQL query engine for big data — makes data queries less painful and acts as a solitary point of access for faster analytics, according to Manfred Moser (pictured), director of technical content at Starburst Data Inc.

“The Trino open-source project started at Facebook in 2012 to solve a specific problem, mainly being large data lakes powered by Hive and Hadoop, trying to get the data out there,” Moser said. “Over the last 10 or 11 years now, it evolved to do much more; it is a distributed query engine. You’re not running one computer; you’re running a cluster of like a hundred, a thousand servers that then process the data to run your queries really fast to do analytics.”

Moser spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier and guest analyst Rob Strechay at Open Source Summit NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Trino simplifies data access and the importance of the open-source ecosystem.

How interactive analytics come to play

Despite Apache Hive being powerful, data changed and it became painful to manage. Trino tackles this challenge through interactive analytics, Moser pointed out.

“Top use cases are things like having data already in a lakehouse or in a data lake and it not being fast enough to query and get the data, the analysis out of it,” he said. “That’s definitely something where on one hand you want Trino to query it. The other hand then is that you want to evolve that away from using just Hive to a more modern storage like Iceberg, maybe, to move it into the cloud.”

Trino’s distributed nature enables enterprises to get insights out of data. On the other hand, Starburst Enterprise allows users to run Trino on-premises with additional security and user interface, whereas Starburst Galaxy makes cloud deployments easy, according to Moser.

“We have like close to 10,000 users on our Slack channel, and we’ve worked with many companies that embed Trino,” he said. “The power of Amazon Athena comes from Trino, and there are many other platforms and companies like at last Trino Fest; we had Apple present, for example. We had SK telecom from South Korea present.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Source Summit NA:

Photo: SiliconANGLE