Presto at Varsity Tutors: Using Federated Queries to Power External Reporting – John Cross

Presto at Varsity Tutors: Using Federated Queries to Power External Reporting – John Cross

Varsity Tutors is a learning platform that enables online academic, professional, and enrichment learning. A growing part of their offering partners with school districts to provide customized support for teachers and students. Varsity Tutors for Schools provides external reporting capabilities including student assessments, progress reports, and more. To provide these timely reports, Varsity Tutors (an AWS shop) uses Presto scripts to perform federated queries across MySQL, Postgres, and Redshift and writes data back to S3. They use Ahana Cloud as their managed service for Presto. In this session, John will discuss what technologies they evaluated, why they chose Presto, and their current data architecture including how they handle security for cross-account writes and how they perform upserts into the final reporting database.

Executing Any External Code in Any Language with Presto – A Universal Connector – Ravishankar Nair

Executing Any External Code in Any Language with Presto – A Universal Connector – Ravishankar Nair

Connector based architecture is one of the powerful features in Presto for extensibility. While we have a solid pack of many connectors, the ability to reuse an existing external snippet to fetch data and access through Presto will make it enormously helpful. For example, consider accessing mainframe code through Presto using simple SQL which is quite cumbersome to handle by creating a connector paradigm. Ravishankar explores how he implemented this feature using a protocol server and a protocol connector which eventually helped him to achieve a patent on the concept.