presto

Presto is used in different domains. In music, presto is a tempo marking indicating a very fast pace, typically faster than allegro. Performers adjust tempo according to style and era; common estimates place presto around 168 to 200 beats per minute, though exact values vary.

In computing, Presto is a distributed SQL query engine designed for interactive analytics across large and diverse data sources. It was developed at Facebook and released as open-source software in the early 2010s. Presto enables queries that join data from data lakes, data warehouses, and relational databases via connectors, without requiring data to be moved into a single system. Its architecture uses a coordinator to parse and plan queries and multiple worker nodes to read and process data in parallel, aiming for low latency on big data workloads. It supports a substantial subset of ANSI SQL, with features such as distributed joins, late materialization, and optimizations for large-scale analytic queries.

Over time, the Presto project split into two major, independently maintained lines. The fork that became known as PrestoSQL—later renamed Trino in 2020—continues as a popular open-source engine with broad community and vendor support. The other stream, often referred to as PrestoDB, traces its lineage to the original Presto codebase and is maintained by different groups and contributors. Both lines are actively developed and deployed in production by organizations around the world, with different release cadences, connectors, and ecosystem tools.