Ahana provides community and commercial support for PrestoDB users
I had the opportunity to speak with Steven Mih, CEO & Co-founder, and Dipti Borkar, Chief Product Officer & Co-founder of Ahana prior to their new company coming out of stealth mode.
Ahana is providing community and commercial support for PrestoDB users. PrestoDB is a federated SQL engine for data engineers and analysts to run interactive, ad hoc analytics on large amounts of data, which continues to grow exponentially across a wide range of data lakes and databases. It enables users to query multiple data sources like Hadoop, AWS S3, Alluxio, MySQL, Cassandra, Kafka, and MongoDB to perform analysis with federated queries on data in place to highlight and obtain insights from the data.
Presto was initially developed as a replacement for Hive but also as a faster replacement for SQL for ad hoc analytics. It’s popular with data-driven internet companies like Twitter, NetFlix, Slack, and Pinterest and enables innovation by citizen data scientists. Users are able to take a subset of data and see if joins with other data to affirm new hypotheses. It enables innovation and disruption with new revenue streams by delivering more value from data.
Presto excels by disaggregating compute and storage. It enables the testing of multiple hypotheses quickly by connecting to any data source without creating it in another database with no data pipeline, no ETL, and the ability to get responses in seconds.
Analysts are able to attach a dashboard on top of Presto so you don’t have to know SQL to enable access to any data source. Users can get queries in under 30 seconds and users are supported on the cloud by using containers of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as well as a PrestoDB container on DockerHub.
The PrestoDB AMI is the first and only completely open-source and completely free Presto offering available on the AWS Marketplace. These free PrestoDB offerings make it easier for data platform teams to get started with Presto in the cloud particularly for interactive, ad hoc analytics on S3 data lakes and other popular data sources like AWS RDS, Redshift, Amazon’s Elasticsearch service, and others.
In addition to the PrestoDB AMI and container, new Presto Sandbox offerings are also available to users getting started with Presto. These include a new Sandbox AMI on the AWS Marketplace and a Sandbox container on DockerHub. They come preconfigured with the Hive Metastore catalog to allow users to query data easily from S3, MySQL, and other data sources as well as with built-in data sets like the TPC-DS benchmark data.
The new AWS AMIs and container offerings are yet another way for PrestoDB users to install and get started with the software. Ahana will also provide commercial support for users who require technical help and management of their container or AMI-based PrestoDB clusters.
According to Dipti, the most prevalent use case will be interactive ad hoc queries to test hypotheses on a new offering like priority delivery of food by running queries on enterprise data to see how much people are willing to pay. Industries with the greatest interest and need in the near-term are financial services, healthcare, retail, telco, and adtech.
There are two Prestos. PrestoDB was created in 2014 while PrestoSQL was created in 2019. The Presto Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation with an open charter and public charter which ensures it will remain open. The Presto Software Foundation was founded by Starburst and there is no guarantee it will be open.