78: A view with a view with a view

Introduction

Long-time Trino user and expert Rob Dickinson joins Manfred and Cole to chat about his continued work on virtual view hierarchies, which he first introduced at Trino Summit 2024. We talk about using AI and agents for development in general, and his deep knowledge and experience from working on ViewZoo, ViewMapper, and other projects.

Video

• Introduction with Manfred and Cole (0.0s)
• Release updates for Trino 478 and 479 (107.0s)
• Manfred mentors 10 about release notes (438.0s)
• Trino Contributor Calls October and November 2025 (480.0s)
• Trino Query UI (575.0s)
• OpenText and Vertica connector and call for input (660.0s)
• PowerBI support for Trino and call for votes (792.0s)
• Manfred mentors (922.0s)
• Introducing Rob Dickinson (1021.0s)
• Discussion on application architecture patterns with views (1181.0s)
• Virtual view manifesto and its use, including for agentic development (1582.0s)
• View Zoo for view storage (2760.0s)
• View Mapper for visualization (2875.0s)
• Use for AI agents, best practices, pitfalls and more (3013.0s)
• Conclusion with Roy (3600.0s)
• Audience question and closing out with upcoming events. (3765.0s)

Host

• Manfred Moser, Sr. Principal DevRel Engineer at Chainguard, open source hacker at simpligility
• Cole Bowden, Senior Developer Advocate at InfluxData

Guest

• Rob Dickinson

Releases and news

Trino 478

• Add support for multiple plugin directories.
• Propagate queryId to the Open Policy Agent authorizer.
• Add support for reading encrypted Parquet files with the Hive connector.
• Add numerous performance improvements and bug fixes for the Iceberg connector.
• Update Docker container to use Java 25.

Trino 479

• Require Java 25 to build and run Trino.
• Publish processing time for a query in the FINISHING state to event listeners.
• Deprecate EXPLAIN type LOGICAL and DISTRIBUTED.
• Add a extraHeaders option to support sending arbitrary HTTP headers to the JDBC driver and the CLI.
• Add APPLICATION_DEFAULT authentication type for GCS.
• Remove support for unauthenticated access when GCS authentication type is set to SERVICE_ACCOUNT.
• Add support for setting and dropping column defaults via ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN to the memory connector.

View Manfred mentors 10 for a more detailed discussion.

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

Other releases and news

• Trino Contributor Call minutes are available:
  • October 2025
  • November 2025
• Trino query UI
  • v0.1.1 successfully released
  • Now blocked by npm process change and necessary work to adapt to it
• OpenText and Vertica connector
  • OpenText is looking for expression of interest from users - contact Manfred or comment on the PR for potential removal
  • Working on collaboration to set up test environment with Trino project
• PowerBI connector for Trino
  • Manfred working with Microsoft and others to figure out future plans
  • Microsoft is looking for your votes for a Trino Fabric connector
• Trino 480 and Trino Gateway 17 are hopefully coming soon
• Manfred mentors videos up to episode 10 now about various Trino topics

Introducing Rob

Rob tells us about his history with Trino, software engineering, and management.

A view with a view with a view

We recap Rob’s past presentation and concepts from Trino Summit 2024 about views and hierarchies of views. Then we move on to discuss all his recent development and work. There include the virtual-view-manifesto and the viewmapper and viewzoo projects.

We also chat about Rob’s journey with AI tooling.

A comparison of application code access to database storage with the different approaches of an ORM layer, a micro service and API layer, and query engine and view layer approach:

A detailed topology of an application taking advantage of virtual view hierarchies:

A concrete example of a view hierarchy for events – two swappable layers, one for mapping to physical databases, and one for calculating event priority:

Resources

• virtual-view-manifesto
• viewmapper for view storage
• viewzoo for view visualization

Rounding out

• 28 Jan 2026 - Trino Contributor Call
• 7 Feb 2026 - Trino meetup in Bangalore
• Looking for guests and topics for Trino Community Broadcast 79 and beyond