2023 Presto Community Year in Review

    Contributors:

    Girish Baliga, Chair, Presto Foundation and Director of Engineering at Uber

    Tim Meehan, Chair, Presto TSC and Software Engineer at IBM

    Ali LeClerc, Chair, Presto Community Team and Product Manager at IBM

    Hello Presto community!

    As we wrap up the year, it’s a great time to reflect on all we accomplished with Presto.

    We had a lot to celebrate in 2023, from the official launch of Presto 2.0 (see our keynote from PrestoCon) to continued growth in both the community and the Presto Foundation. We’re happy to share our year-in-review infographic below, which highlights the growth in our community this year.

    As you can see, we are thrilled to have over 30 different organizations actively contributing to the Presto open-source project this year. Some of these contributions were quite significant, including a History Based Optimizer (HBO) on Redis for Presto by Uber and a new Presto JS connector by Bhuma. 

    From a technical perspective, we continue to focus on building the best vertically integrated engine for the Open Data Lakehouse. In fact, we believe we are the biggest and healthiest community doing so! Teams of engineers from Meta, IBM, Bytedance, Uber, Intel, and more are closely working together to advance the Presto engine. As we shared in our PrestoCon opening keynote, we believe in the power of a collective — individually we may have different needs for Presto, but together we move Presto forward as a whole.

    So what did we work on specifically? We continue to invest deeply in building Prestissimo, the Presto-on-Velox engine that gives Presto a huge performance boost (Presto 2.0). Did you see some of the benchmarks shared by IBM, Bytedance, and Meta at PrestoCon? 

    We also are building better table format support for Presto. In Apache Iceberg we added support for V2 reads, time travel queries, and caching support. We continue to partner closely with Apache Hudi as well with native support for Hudi on Presto.

    Other key areas include Presto-on-Spark on the native worker, and more work going into the Presto optimizer. Speaking of, we also started our Presto working groups this year. These groups are open to anyone in the community who wants to contribute to any of these areas: Optimizer, Native Worker, Architecture, Security. We encourage you to join one!

    This year we finally got back to more in-person community events. From NYC to Bangalore to the Bay Area, it was great seeing the faces of our Presto community.

    As we head into 2024, we’re excited about Presto 2.0, other technical enhancements to the Presto project, and continued growth in project activity. And we’re looking forward to more ways to connect as a community, including meetups, conferences, and of course PrestoCon and PrestoCon Day.

    Finally, we’ll close with the fact that we’re proud to be a Linux Foundation project that is governed neutrally by a board made up of a consortium of industry leaders. We believe open governance is critical for open-source projects, and we have worked hard to ensure our community is inclusive and welcoming to all.

    We’re so grateful to everyone who participates in the ongoing Presto journey. Whether you’re an active long-time committer or just starting to dip your toe into the Presto project, thanks to each and every one of you. 

    Here’s to a bright and successful 2024!