# Trino

9 Hacker News commenters recommended Trino and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-source SQL engine that treats many data sources as tables, with a mature set of extensions; one critic says it beats Spark only above 100GiB datasets.

## Why people recommend it

- Queries many data sources as tables (2 comments): "the ability with tools like trino or datafusion to basically turn "everything" into a table" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184513)) "let you deep query on a JSON field" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159089))
- Views and pipelines for consuming data (2 comments): "add some views in Trino to consume the data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47799115)) "go find yourself a trino spark pipeline" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47470181))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [DuckDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/duckdb.md): 390 recommend
- [ClickHouse](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clickhouse.md): 124 recommend
- [Exasol](https://hackerapproved.com/p/exasol.md): 8 recommend
- [chDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chdb.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Trino", https://hackerapproved.com/p/trino/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).