Trino is used for critical decisions, such as financial analytics for public
markets, and results must always be correct.
Secure
Trino is a gateway to sensitive information, and must protect that
information.
Long term
We expect that Trino will be used for at least the next 20 years. We build
for the long term.
Standards-based
These can be formal standards like ANSI SQL, JDBC or ODBC, or implicit
conventions of industry standard databases. This makes it easier for users and
integrators, because their existing skills transfer.
Just works
Simple to get started. Trino should just work out of the box and provide good
performance with minimal setup. Trino is a large complex system, so
simplification makes everything better.
Supported
Everything that ships with Trino is supported. This means that features that
cannot be tested and supported are not added. For example, PowerPC support was
only added when test hardware became available.
Real world uses
Trino is designed and tuned for real world workloads over synthetic
benchmarks.
Commercially viable
We encourage enterprises to use Trino for their analytics needs, and we
encourage vendors to base products on Trino. We appreciate contributions
back, but do not require them.
Trino is a standalone server, and only provides libraries, such as a JDBC driver
and a Python client, for external applications to connect to Trino. The
internal details such as the parser, planner, analyzer, optimizer, etc., are
not public APIs, and are not supported as libraries.
For analytics
Trino is designed to perform queries over large segments of data, and is not
designed for point reads and updates of single rows of data (i.e. OLAP not
OLTP).
Big analytics
Trino is designed to process large, resource-intensive queries. This includes
traditional long-running batch workloads, but also includes workloads that must
be done quickly or with limited resources.
Distributed system
Trino is designed for computations across many networked computers. It is not
designed for single computer installations. If your analytics can be executed
on a single computer, there are many other excellent solutions available.
Trusted
Trino performs authentication and authorization of requests, and therefore is
assumed to be a trusted environment.
There are many ways to develop software; this is the way that works for this
specific project.
Guidelines, not rules
We believe in having good programmers, who make high quality, thoughtful,
decisions, not those that just follow rules, because rules need to be broken
from time to time.
Readability
Our code is written for the readability of the next person. This takes longer,
but eases maintenance and improvements over the long term.
High quality
We have a high bar for changes, and carefully review each proposed change. The
change process is optimized to reduce the burden on end-users, admins, and
future maintainers, and not the productivity of the developer proposing the
change.
Meticulous
System-wide changes are carefully considered. End user visible changes such
as functions, language changes, connectors, etc., are carefully selected to
provide a consistent user experience over the long term. Library dependencies
are carefully chosen based on quality, reliability, and impact on other
dependencies. System-wide abstractions are carefully designed to ease the
development of the entire system. Expect any change of this type to be
discussed and considered at length.
Java software
Trino is written in Java, and takes advantage of modern Java features.
Standard Java build tools, libraries, and development environments are used to
ease the on-boarding of developers.
Complexity balance
There is a careful balance between the value a feature provides and the
complexity introduced to the system. Similarly, the complexity of performance
improvements must be justified by the real world impact. From the opposite
side, real word requirements often necessitate complexity.
Multiple use cases
Trino is designed for a variety of use cases. There are installations that
exclusively run multi-hour batch jobs, and others that run sub-second queries.
Some installations must be able to share resources between interactive low
latency queries and long-running background queries. Features cannot break one
use case to improve another case; all cases must be well-supported in one
codebase.
Adaptation over configuration
As a complex multi-tenant query engine that executes arbitrary user defined
computation, Trino must be adaptive not only to different query
characteristics, but also combinations of characteristics. Without
adaptiveness, it would be necessary to narrowly partition workloads and tune
configuration for each workload independently. That approach does not scale to
the wide variety of query shapes seen in the real world.
Founder-led
Trino was created over 10 years ago, and its co-creators are still active in
its development, serving as project leaders. They steer technical
decision-making with the best interests of the project in mind.