Amazon Aurora vs Presto

• Aurora is a relational database as a service on AWS which is MySQL and Postgres compatible. So if you are looking for a serverless option which going through need to host and manage a database then Aurora as a service is great.
• It is a simple and cost-effective open source database which is much cheaper than a normal database cost. Hence very efficient for microservices database where you do not need one very large centralized database but many small databases that are available and low latency.
• Aurora provides high performance and low latency. Last year they also announced multi-master in the same region and read replicas in multiple regions. This is very convenient if you are trying to design and build a highly reliable application.

Read full review

• Fast - Presto, is incredibly fast due to its optimized query engine and is well suited for interactive analysis.
• Flexible - Presto is highly flexible as it operates with a plug and play model for data sources. Joining and query across different data sources is very easy with presto (eg. HDFS, MySQL, Kafka).
• ANSI Sql - Presto follows ANSI SQL which is the recognized SQL language and hence helps allow easy query migration without much overhead.
• Large Fact + Small Dimension table joins made fast - By design presto excels most distributed query engines out there in this type of queries.

Read full review

• The cost of Amazon Aurora when compared to a simple MySQL instance is considerably higher, so we really need to look at and run some performance tests to compare if the performance improvements are worth the extra cost.
• Although backup restores are a rare feature to use, when we need them it is always painful to restore our data. We are always searching for a database service to provide new and innovating features in terms of data recovery. For instance, being able to search on backup information to see if the needed data is there. It is a very common need to compare the hot data with the backup data, for example to fix some database data that a malfunction application wrongly updated.
• Since aurora is an Amazon relational database service there is no way to run a dev database on a local storage for tests and development.

Read full review

• Presto was not designed for large fact fact joins. This is by design as presto does not leverage disk and used memory for processing which in turn makes it fast.. However, this is a tradeoff..in an ideal world, people would like to use one system for all their use cases, and presto should get exhaustive by solving this problem.
• Resource allocation is not similar to YARN and presto has a priority queue based query resource allocation..so a query that takes long takes longer...this might be alleviated by giving some more control back to the user to define priority/override.
• UDF Support is not available in presto. You will have to write your own functions..while this is good for performance, it comes at a huge overhead of building exclusively for presto and not being interoperable with other systems like Hive, SparkSQL etc.

Read full review

• The main positive for my team is the time that has been freed up from the tasks of managing updates and fixing replication issues.
• A negative for myself as a database administrator is removal of features that were available in Mysql. Examples include 1) the use of the storage engines other than InnoDB (such as the Federated Storage Engine), 2) certain administrative privileges such as ability to export to csv file and easy ability to kill processes. I seem to also forget they removed the built-in kill ability and you must use their own provided kill functionality.

Read full review

• Presto has helped scale Uber's interactive data needs. We have migrated a lot out of proprietary tech like Vertica.
• Presto has helped build data driven applications on its stack than maintain a separate online/offline stack.
• Presto has helped us build data exploration tools by leveraging it's power of interactive and is immensely valuable for data scientists.

Read full review