Query Engines
Data architecture technologies for sQL engines that query data where it lives — lakes, table formats, and federated sources.
Distributed SQL engine, and the project Trino forked from
Query Engines
Presto is a distributed SQL query engine for federated analytics, governed by the Presto Foundation under the Linux Foundation, whose members include Meta, IBM, Uber, and Nvidia — the original codebase that PrestoSQL forked from before renaming itself Trino.
Arrow-native query engine you embed rather than deploy
Query Engines
Apache DataFusion is an extensible query engine written in Rust that uses Apache Arrow as its in-memory format, shipped as libraries for building database and analytic systems rather than as a server to run.
Single-node DataFrame engine in Rust, fast enough to skip the cluster
Query Engines
Polars is a DataFrame library written in Rust with a Python interface, built around a query optimiser and Arrow memory rather than row-by-row execution, and designed as a single-node engine that handles data most teams would otherwise put on a cluster.
Serverless SQL over S3, billed by the terabyte scanned
Query Engines
Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that runs SQL directly against data in Amazon S3, with no infrastructure to provision and a bill computed from the data each query scans.
Commercial Trino, self-managed or fully hosted
Query Engines
Starburst is the commercial platform built on Trino, sold as Starburst Enterprise for self-managed clusters and Starburst Galaxy as a fully managed service, adding governance, performance work, and a supported Iceberg lakehouse on top of the open-source engine.
Lakehouse query engine with a semantic layer and query acceleration
Query Engines
Dremio is a SQL engine for the lakehouse that federates queries across Iceberg, Delta Lake, databases, and warehouses, and accelerates them with materialised structures it calls Reflections — available as a free Community edition, a self-managed Enterprise edition, and a managed cloud service.
SQL over Hadoop, still shipping and now Iceberg-native
Query Engines
Apache Hive is a distributed, fault-tolerant data warehouse system that enables analytics at massive scale, running SQL over data in the Hadoop ecosystem on Apache Tez, with LLAP for sub-second queries and first-class Apache Iceberg support in the 4.x line.
Distributed SQL query engine for federated analytics
Query Engines
Trino is an open-source distributed SQL engine that queries data where it lives — object storage, lakehouse table formats, and operational databases — through a single interface.
In-process analytical database for local and embedded analytics
Query Engines
DuckDB is an open-source, in-process OLAP database — an embeddable columnar SQL engine that queries Parquet, CSV, and dataframes with no server to run.