Presto Query Engine

A SQL query engine is one that interprets standard SQL commands to access data in relational systems. A query engine is also commonly referred to as a SQL database engine or a SQL engine. The primary job of a query engine is to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) data from a database. Query engines differ from data warehouse functionality in that with query engines, storage is separated from compute, with an emphasis on scalability and elasticity. A key feature of query engines is that you can point several query engines at the same data. If you have a lot of data stored and need to bring analytics to it, a query engine is the best tool for the job.

Presto is an open source, distributed SQL query engine for fast, interactive queries on data in Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, MySQL, and many other data sources. At a high level, a query engine is software that runs on top of a database or server; it queries data located in a database or server. It can be used by both users and applications. To put it in a different way, a query engine is software (compute processing) that you can bring to the data in order to query it.

Presto can query data where it is stored, without needing to move data into a separate analytics system. It’s an ANSI SQL-compliant query engine and works with BI tools such as R, Tableau, MicroStrategy, Power BI, and Superset.

Query execution runs in parallel over a pure memory-based architecture, with most results returning in seconds. With Presto, users can query data from multiple data sources within a single query.