Big-data SQL query engine Presto has gone the way of many an aspiring open-source project and sought security through foundation
The Presto Software Foundation was announced Friday with the goal of ensuring its namesake project, which was open-sourced by Facebook in 2013 and has racked up a roster of serious users, remains “open, collaborative and independent for decades to come.”
Presto creators Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom and David Phillips are behind the Foundation, with engineers from Starburst Data, Arm Treasure Data, Qubole and Vara on board.
Regular meetings to co-ordinate community development are scheduled to begin in “the next few weeks.”
Taverso in a statement called the Foundation the next logical step following the rapid expansion of Presto and the user community in the last few years.
“From the beginning, we stressed the importance of code quality, architectural extensibility and open collaboration with the community…. Establishing a non-profit to institutionalise these values is the next logical step to ensure that this product stands the test of time.”
Presto started life in 2012 at Facebook, as an alternative to using Apache Hive for analysts to run interactive queries on its large Apache Hadoop data warehouse.
The Java-written query engine – which operates under an Apache license – can run distributed queries on petabytes of data from a variety of data sources including AWS’ S3, Hadoop and Kafka.
Among those today employing Presto are Airbnb, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitter and Wal-mart.