Presto® Use Cases

What Presto Is

Presto provides a quick and easy way to allow access to data from a variety of sources using industry standard ANSI SQL query language. Further, end users don’t have to learn any new complex language or new tool; they can simply utilize existing tools with which they are comfortable.

It handles Online Analytics Processing workloads and although more recently Presto has added features to handle insertions more efficiently, Presto shines in cases of reading and federating data in your data warehouse or data lake. 

Presto can offer a more agile approach to data access by data consumers.

The original use cases of Presto fall under interactive analytics, smaller Batch ETL jobs, and A/B Testing.

What Presto Is Not

Since Presto is being called a database by many members of the community, it makes sense to define what Presto is not. Do not mistake the fact that Presto understands SQL with it providing the features of a standard database. Presto is not a general-purpose relational database and is not a replacement for databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle. Moreover, Presto was not designed to handle Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), similar to other databases designed and optimized for data warehousing or analytics.