Query engines & federation · Trino Software Foundation

Trino

Open-source distributed SQL engine that queries data across warehouses, lakes and databases without moving it.

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Trino is an open-source distributed SQL query engine designed to run interactive analytic queries against data wherever it lives, rather than requiring it be loaded into a single database first. A single Trino query can join tables across object storage (via Iceberg, Hive or Delta Lake), relational databases, Kafka and other systems through its connector architecture, using massively parallel, in-memory execution across a cluster of coordinator and worker nodes. It was forked from Presto in 2020 by Presto's original creators and has since diverged with its own roadmap and community governance under the Trino Software Foundation. Trino is self-hosted by default and commonly deployed on Kubernetes; the commercial company Starburst packages it as a managed and enterprise-supported product. It is best suited to teams needing one SQL layer over already-fragmented data rather than a place to store data long-term.

At a glance

Vendor Trino Software Foundation
Pricing model Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes
Deployment Self-hosted
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0)
Best for Teams needing a single SQL query layer across data already spread across multiple systems.

Pricing

Free and open source; commercial managed and enterprise-supported distributions are sold separately by Starburst.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features

  • Federated SQL queries across heterogeneous data sources
  • Pluggable connector architecture (Iceberg, Hive, Kafka, JDBC sources)
  • Massively parallel, in-memory distributed execution
  • ANSI SQL compatibility
  • Cost-based query optimizer
  • Fine-grained access control via connectors

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Presto Open-source distributed SQL engine originally built at Facebook for interactive queries across large datasets. Starburst Commercial data platform built on Trino, offering managed and self-hosted federated SQL query with enterprise governance. Apache Spark Open-source distributed processing engine for large-scale batch, SQL, streaming and machine-learning workloads.

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Terms to know

Data lakehouse A storage architecture that adds warehouse-style structure and transactions directly on top of low-cost data lake storage. Data warehouse A centralized, structured database optimized for fast historical reporting rather than day-to-day transactions. Query engine The software component that parses, plans, and executes queries against one or more data sources.

Related guides

How to choose a distributed query engine This category bundles two different jobs — federating SQL across existing systems, and distributed compute for pipelines and ML — start by telling them apart.