What a long journey it has been! From the start Trino supported querying Hive data and used libraries from the Hive and Hadoop ecosystem. With the release of Trino 470 we mark another milestone to more features and better performance for data lake and lakehouse querying with Trino. We deprecated the legacy file system support, and will permanently remove them in an upcoming release.
Background #
Trino always had a focus on performance and security. As a result we implemented custom readers for file formats like Apache ORC and Apache Parquet many years ago. We also have improved libraries for compression and decompression of files from object storage and and implemented our own support for other table formats with the Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake and Apache Hudi connectors.
For the underlying object storage solutions and file systems, we originally extended the libraries around the Hive system and added implementations for Amazon S3, Azure Storage, Google Cloud Storage and others. Over time the mismatch of the HDFS libraries and the cloud-centric usage with modern file systems became more and more of a maintenance headache. It also represented an unnecessary complexity overhead, resulted in performance problems, and forced us to carry the Hadoop dependencies with all their baggage of old Java code and security issues.
In the end David Philips, as our file system lead, decided in 2022 that it was time to write our own file system support as needed for Trino. By summer of 2023 and with Trino 419 a first support for S3 became available for the Iceberg and Delta Lake connectors. Over a year later in September 2024 and with Trino 458, we declared the old file system support on top of the Hadoop libraries legacy and advised users to migrate.
Since then you are required to declare what file system you want to enable in
each catalog with fs.native-azure.enabled=true,fs.native-gcs.enabled=true or
fs.native-s3.enabled=true. If you are truly using HDFS, or if you insist on
using the old legacy support you can also use fs.hadoop.enabled=true.
Trino 470 #
With the recent Trino 470 release from February 2025, we took the next step. All catalog configuration properties for using the old, legacy support for accessing Azure Storage, Google Cloud Storage, S3, and S3-compatible file systems are now deprecated.
These properties include all names starting with hive.azure, hive.cos,
hive.gcs, and hive.s3. The result of this deprecation is that Trino emits
warnings during the startup for each of these properties in the server log.
We also removed all documentation for the old properties, leaving only relevant migration guides in place.
Next steps #
Within the next weeks or months we will completely remove all these properties and the underlying code. We therefore renew our call out from numerous contributor calls, Trino Community Broadcast episodes, and our Trino Fest and Trino Summit events:
Stop using the old legacy file systems today.
If you need help, have a look at the documentation for your connector, the file system you use, and the migration guide for each file system:
- Delta Lake connector
- Hive connector
- Hudi connector
- Iceberg connector
- Azure Storage file system support
- Google Cloud Storage file system support
- S3 file system support
The new systems are more stable and performant, and save you time and money. Migrate today, and if you encounter any issues, or find that there are features missing, ping us on Slack and chime in on the roadmap issue for the removal of the legacy file system support.