Connect, manage, and govern data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
In today’s data landscape, organizations often grapple with massive, distributed data estates spanning multiple clouds and on-premises systems. This complexity leads to data silos and costly, time-consuming data movement for analysis.
A unified data fabric addresses this challenge by providing an architectural layer that automates and orchestrates data discovery, access, and management across distributed, hybrid environments. It connects data, without data movement, from any source, applies consistent governance, and delivers unified access for analytics, AI, and real-time decision-making.
Trino, an open-source distributed SQL query engine, is a key component of Cloudera’s data fabric. It enables big data analytics and data engineering by running interactive queries and batch processing across vast amounts of data, without requiring unnecessary data movement or storage format conversions. Trino can, in a single query, collate data from multiple sources, including data lakes, and run federated queries across these disparate systems.
High-Level Use Cases for Trino
Trino is versatile, supporting a diverse array of use cases–from high-speed, ad-hoc analytics to complex batch processes.
Centralized Data Access and Analytics with Query Federation
Query federation is a core strength of Trino. It provides the ability to query many disparate data sources within the same system using a single SQL query. This capability dramatically simplifies analytics for users who need a comprehensive view of all their data. Trino's architecture is designed for diverse connectivity, allowing it to federate across dozens of heterogeneous sources. A key feature is zero-copy data, which eliminates the need for expensive, and sometimes risky, data movement or replication.
Interactive and High-Performance Data Analytics
Trino is primarily driven by interactive analytics. It’s built from the ground up for efficient, low-latency query performance. Data analysts and data scientists can query large amounts of data, run hypotheses, conduct A/B testing, and build visualizations or dashboards directly. Trino is designed to be so performant that it enables analytics that were previously impossible or took hours to complete.
Batch ETL Processing Across Disparate Systems
While interactive analysis is key, Trino also accelerates large extract, transform, load (ETL) processes that typically run in batches and are resource-intensive. Engineers can speed up ETL processes using standard SQL statements, avoiding more complex, error-prone, and hard-to-maintain code-based ETL processes that work with a range of data sources and targets.
Cloudera with Trino: A Unified Data Fabric is the Pathway to Agentic AI Anywhere
Cloudera's integration of Trino addresses the needs of organizations with large, heterogeneous data estates, preparing organizations for the future of data: agentic AI. And a unified data fabric is the foundation for trusted AI.
The key differentiators of the Cloudera + Trino integration include low-latency performance for agentic AI anywhere, providing real-time reasoning directly within business flows, with unified governance and security, and a focused experience with AI automation.
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Deployment: AI Everywhere
Cloudera provides an anywhere cloud experience with a data and AI platform that allows customers to run the identical software stack and unified control plane across public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises data centers. This is a decisive advantage for organizations concerned with data sovereignty and regulatory requirements.
Trino on Cloudera is optimized for on-premises and cloud environments and can be deployed to federate data across systems using certified connectors. Unlike cloud-native, SaaS-only architectures, Cloudera's hybrid approach is essential for regulated industries, like banking and government, whose operational data cannot be moved to a public cloud vendor’s SaaS platform.
Low-Latency Performance for Agentic AI
Cloudera leverages Trino's architecture to enable operational AI—the application of AI/ML models to live, real-time business processes—key to anyone pursuing agentic AI. Trino’s architecture is massively parallel processing (MPP), in-memory, and pipelined, allowing for sub-second to few-second performance. For interactive analytics workloads, Trino can be 2 to 30 times faster than Apache Spark. Data scientists can embed real-time model inference logic directly into a low-latency, federated Trino query, combining fast federated access with the power of Python AI/ML for true operational AI and agentic workflows.
Unified Governance and Security
For enterprise adoption, centralized governance is paramount. Trino is integrated with Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX), ensuring consistent security and management. This added layer of security ensures that all metadata and access controls are unified to simplify management and self-service access. Cloudera delivers a single endpoint to access all data across various engines, including Trino, without needing to replicate access and security policies.
Focused Experience and AI Automation
Cloudera enhances the user experience for administrators and practitioners, driving efficiency and democratizing access to data. Teams benefit from automated warehouse management, natural language access, and simplified administration through guided federation connector setup and a true hybrid deployment model–simplifying data architecture and empowering zero-copy analytics with no ETL burden.
With Trino, Cloudera delivers a "govern once, access everywhere" solution, providing a secure, high-performance query engine that runs identically across your hybrid estate–a necessity for mastering the complexity of modern enterprise data and enabling real-time AI workflows.
Next Steps: Building a Unified Data Fabric with Cloudera and Trino
Cloudera’s unified data fabric enables organizations to govern every dataset, track every lineage, and trust every prediction, ensuring responsible AI that aligns with enterprise and regulatory standards. Trino extends the value of Cloudera’s data fabric by centralizing data access, performing interactive and high-performance analytics, and running batch processing across disparate systems.
To learn more about how Cloudera with Trino can transform your analytics and AI experience, schedule a virtual demo.
Cloudera was recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Fabric Platforms, Q4 2025. Access the report to understand the trends shaping data fabric architectures—and how we believe Cloudera continues to lead the way.
