69: Client protocol improvements

Introduction

Manfred Moser and Cole Bowden are joined by Mateusz Gajewski to discuss the development of the new spooling mode for the Trino client protocol. We look at cluster configuration, client drivers, and run some demos.

Video

• Introduction (0.0s)
• Releases 469 (70.0s)
• Other news (437.0s)
• Introducing Mateusz Gajewski and his Trino missions (479.0s)
• Client protocol with spooling - introduction and initial discussion (655.0s)
• Presentation - Agenda (1022.0s)
• Direct protocol (1085.0s)
• Direct protocol flow (1380.0s)
• Spooling protocol objectives (1866.0s)
• Implementation (2212.0s)
• Wire format comparison (2619.0s)
• Spooling protocol flow (2848.0s)
• Implications (3440.0s)
• Configuration (3920.0s)
• Retrieval modes (4161.0s)
• Demo time (4426.0s)
• Summary and extras (5072.0s)
• Conclusion (5504.0s)

Audio

Host

• Manfred Moser, Director/Open Source Engineering at Starburst - @simpligility
• Cole Bowden, Developer Advocate at Firebolt

Guests

• Mateusz Gajewski, Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Starburst

Releases

Follow are some highlights of the first release of 2025. It took us a bit longer to work through release blockers this time:

Trino 469

• Add support for the FIRST, AFTER, and LAST clauses to ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN for Iceberg, MySQL, and MariaDB.
• SSE-C in S3 security mapping for Delta Lake, Hive, Hudi, and Iceberg
• Allow configuration for Google Cloud Storage endpoint with object storage connectors.
• Allow connection validation and add more stats for JDBC driver.
• Remove support for connector-level event listeners.
• Misc improvements for the Faker connector.

As always, numerous performance improvements, bug fixes, and other features were added as well.

Other news

• Trino Python client 0.332.0 with spooling support
• Trino contributor call

Introducing wendigo

What can we say? Top contributor and maintainer, and all around hacker on Trino, numerous Trino subprojects, Airlift, and beyond.

Main topic

Let’s talk about the Trino client protocol. Following are some topics we cover:

• What is the client protocol for?
• History of the client protocol
• Available client drivers and client applications
• Architecture and flow
• Motivation to improve the protocol
• Direct and spooling modes

Mateusz walks through the presentation and Cole and Manfred ask a lot of questions:

Demo time

Mateusz show us his example and testing setup with Starburst Galaxy clusters configured for spooling protocol use and shares some of the performance gains he observes.

Resources

• Presentation
• Client protocol documentation
• Available client drivers
• Available client applications

Rounding out

Join us for upcoming events and let us know if you want to be the next guest.

If you want to learn more about Trino, check out the definitive guide from O’Reilly. You can get the free PDF from Starburst or buy the English, Polish, Chinese, or Japanese edition.