Meet Ahana: community and commercial support for PrestoDB

Virginia Backaitis
Digitizing Polaris
Published in
3 min readJun 30, 2020

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If you thought that big data was supposed to make us smarter and lead to better decisions, you were, at least, partly right. But as big data keeps getting bigger and data workers see an increased need for fast ad hoc querying, they need better tools.

Presto fits the bill. It was created specifically for interactive analytics and works near the speed of commercial data warehouses while scaling to the size of organizations like Facebook, where it was originally built. An organization like Uber, for example, might use Presto to figure out whether it should offer $4.99 or $6.99 for the next ride.

According to some sources, Facebook donated Presto to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) where it seems to never have taken root. (Note: Despite what Starburst Data, which has a proprietary offering based on a forked version of Presto, claims there is no evidence to suggest that Presto is an ASF Project.)

Open source Presto, and the Presto Foundation, are, however, listed under the Linux Foundation; in other words, that is where the open source Presto project is based. Its founding members include Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber; Alluxio, and Ahana have more recently joined them.

Meet Ahana

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