Trino blog

Trino's summer of grammar

26 Jun 2026 | Martin Traverso, Mateusz Gajewski

What a query engine runs, before anything else, is a language. And like any language, SQL is defined by its grammar: the predicates, operators, and forms you’re allowed to write down. Trino has always spoken SQL fluently, but the ISO 9075 standard is a big book, and there have always been a few corners of it we hadn’t gotten around to implementing yet.

Trino 482 closes a remarkable number of those gaps in a single release. So many, in fact, that we started calling it the summer of grammar. This post walks through the new language features, and because reading SQL is never quite as convincing as running it, every example below is live. Hit Run and watch Trino 482 evaluate it for real.

Introducing the NUMBER data type

25 Mar 2026 | Piotr Findeisen, Starburst Data

One of Trino’s core strengths is breaking down data silos—enabling data engineers to query diverse data sources through a single SQL interface. However, when those sources use high-precision numeric types beyond Trino’s 38-digit DECIMAL limit, that promise breaks down. Users faced an impossible choice: skip the columns entirely and lose access to critical data, or accept lossy rounding that compromises data integrity.

This challenge required a new approach: a dedicated data type for high-precision, variable-scale decimals.

Core Principles and Design Practices of OLAP Engines

27 Mar 2025 | Yiteng Xu, Yingju Gao, Manfred Moser

Yiteng Xu and Yingju Gao are proudly announcing the new book “Core Principle and Design Practices of OLAP Engines” from China Machine Press. This is great news for the Trino community, since the book is based on the open source project Trino, specifically Trino 350. It took more than four years for the two authors to finish writing. All concepts and details are explained with Trino falvor and generalized to all OLAP engines. Let us walk throught the chapters and you will find out the two author dive deep into the source code layer and bring you so many treasures.