Trino
Query everything where it already lives, without moving any of it.
91
sovereigntyTrino is a distributed SQL engine that queries data in place — S3, Postgres, MySQL, Kafka, Elasticsearch — and joins across all of them in a single statement. Apache-2.0, around 13k stars, built by the team behind Presto. The point is that it removes the loading step entirely: no ingestion pipeline, no second copy, no drift between the warehouse and the source. That is a genuinely different architecture from Snowflake rather than a cheaper version of it, and it suits organisations whose data is scattered and will stay scattered.
OPEN SOURCEApache-2.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseApache-2.0
PricingFree and open source. Managed options from Starburst and others.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +Queries data where it lives — no ingestion, no second copy
- +Joins across completely different systems in one SQL statement
- +Apache-2.0 with a large connector ecosystem
- +Proven at very large scale
Where it falls short
- −A cluster to operate, with real memory tuning
- −Only as fast as the slowest underlying source
- −No storage of its own — it is an engine, not a warehouse
- −Java operations knowledge assumed
Trino as an alternative to
Where Trino shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Trino head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.