Is the Hive metastore a hard dependency of Presto, or could Presto be configured to use something else like Postgres?

With Presto, there’s no hard dependency of having to use the Hive metastore – it’s catalog-agnostic. However, there are significant advantages like better performance when you use the Hive metastore.

A managed service like Ahana Cloud for Presto provides a managed version of a Hive metastore catalog, so you don’t have to deal with the complexity of managing their own metastore. Ahana also supports AWS Glue as a data catalog service.

You don’t necessarily have to use the metastore if you are connecting via the provided connectors such as MySQL, PostGres, Redshift, Elastic, etc. But if you intend to query data on S3, for instance, you will need a metastore (i.e. Hive or Glue) to define external tables and their formats.

Presto has many connectors including Postgres, which is a supported data source.