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.

PrestoDB in HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics – Milind Bhandarkar, HPE

PrestoDB in HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics – Milind Bhandarkar, HPE


HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics is an end-to-end data & AI/ML platform that consists of several popular open-source frameworks for data engineering, data analytics, data science, & ML engineering in a well-integrated packaging. These open-source frameworks include Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Apache Superset, PrestoDB, MLFlow, Kubeflow, and Feast. This platform is built atop Kubernetes and provides built in security. In this talk we will focus on the role of PrestoDB in Unified Analytics as a fast SQL query engine, and also as a secure data access layer. We will discuss some of our value-additions to PrestoDB, such as a distributed memory-centric columnar caching layer that provides both explicit and transparent caching for dataset fragments, often leading to 3x to 4x query performance. We will conclude by proposing to make caching pluggable in PrestoDB and discussing future directions.