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.

The Future of Presto’s Query Optimizer – Bill McKenna, Ahana

The Future of Presto’s Query Optimizer – Bill McKenna, Ahana

In this talk, you will hear from the query optimizer OG himself, Bill McKenna (Principal software engineer at Ahana, Architect for the query optimizer that became the code base of the Amazon Redshift query optimizer, and co-author of The Volcano Optimizer Generator: Extensibility and Efficient Search) go into detail about the state of modern query optimizers, and how Presto stacks up against them and where it will go in the near future. If database theory is your jam, you won’t want to miss this deeply technical presentation from one of the pioneers in the field.