A SQL database engine is also known as a SQL query engine or a SQL engine. Software that uses SQL commands to access a database and query data is called a SQL engine.
Presto is an open source SQL database engine for interactive analytics. It executes SQL statements and turns these statements into queries that are executed across a distributed cluster of coordinator and workers. SQL is the oldest and the most widely-used language for data analysis. Analysts, data engineers and data scientists use SQL for exploring data, building dashboards, and testing hypotheses with notebooks like Jupyter and Zeppelin, or with BI tools like Tableau, PowerBI, and Looker, etc.
Presto is a federated query engine that has the ability to query data not just from distributed file systems, but also from other sources such as NoSQL stores like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and RDBMS and even message queues like Kafka.
Presto is community owned and driven, and is managed by the Presto Foundation, an independent nonprofit organization, which is hosted under the Linux Foundation. Presto provides an additional compute layer for faster analytics. It doesn’t store the data, which gives it the massive advantage of being able to scale resources for queries up and down based on demand. Data platform teams are increasingly using Presto as their go-to SQL query engine to run analytics across data sources where they are, with no need to move data.