Pinot connector

The Pinot connector allows Trino to query data stored in Apache Pinot™.

Requirements

To connect to Pinot, you need:

• Pinot 0.9.3 or higher.
• Network access from the Trino coordinator and workers to the Pinot controller nodes. Port 8098 is the default port.

Configuration

To configure the Pinot connector, create a catalog properties file e.g. etc/catalog/pinot.properties with at least the following contents:

connector.name=pinot
pinot.controller-urls=host1:8098,host2:8098

Replace host1:8098,host2:8098 with a comma-separated list of Pinot controller nodes. This can be the ip or the FDQN, the url scheme (http://) is optional.

Configuration properties

The following configuration properties are available:

Property Name	Required	Description
pinot.controller-urls	Yes	A comma separated list of controller hosts. If Pinot is deployed via Kubernetes this needs to point to the controller service endpoint. The Pinot broker and server must be accessible via DNS as Pinot returns hostnames and not IP addresses.
pinot.segments-per-split	No	The number of segments processed in a split. Setting this higher reduces the number of requests made to Pinot. This is useful for smaller Pinot clusters.
pinot.request-timeout	No	The timeout for Pinot requests. Increasing this can reduce timeouts if DNS resolution is slow.
pinot.controller.authentication.type	No	Pinot authentication method for controller requests. Allowed values are NONE and PASSWORD - defaults toNONE which is no authentication.
pinot.controller.authentication.user	No	Controller username for basic authentication method.
pinot.controller.authentication.password	No	Controller password for basic authentication method.
pinot.broker.authentication.type	No	Pinot authentication method for broker requests. Allowed values are NONE and PASSWORD - defaults toNONE which is no authentication.
pinot.broker.authentication.user	No	Broker username for basic authentication method.
pinot.broker.authentication.password	No	Broker password for basic authentication method.

If pinot.controller.authentication.type is set to PASSWORD then both pinot.controller.authentication.user and pinot.controller.authentication.password are required.

If pinot.broker.authentication.type is set to PASSWORD then both pinot.broker.authentication.user and pinot.broker.authentication.password are required.

You can use secrets to avoid actual values in the catalog properties files.

Querying Pinot tables

The Pinot connector automatically exposes all tables in the default schema of the catalog. You can list all tables in the pinot catalog with the following query:

SHOW TABLES FROM pinot.default;

You can list columns in the flight_status table:

DESCRIBE pinot.default.flight_status;
SHOW COLUMNS FROM pinot.default.flight_status;

Queries written with SQL are fully supported and can include filters and limits:

SELECT foo
FROM pinot_table
WHERE bar = 3 AND baz IN ('ONE', 'TWO', 'THREE')
LIMIT 25000;

Dynamic tables

To leverage Pinot's fast aggregation, a Pinot query written in PQL can be used as the table name. Filters and limits in the outer query are pushed down to Pinot. Let's look at an example query:

SELECT *
FROM pinot.default."SELECT MAX(col1), COUNT(col2) FROM pinot_table GROUP BY col3, col4"
WHERE col3 IN ('FOO', 'BAR') AND col4 > 50
LIMIT 30000

Filtering and limit processing is pushed down to Pinot.

The queries are routed to the broker and are more suitable to aggregate queries.

For SELECT queries without aggregates it is more performant to issue a regular SQL query. Processing is routed directly to the servers that store the data.

The above query is translated to the following Pinot PQL query:

SELECT MAX(col1), COUNT(col2)
FROM pinot_table
WHERE col3 IN('FOO', 'BAR') and col4 > 50
TOP 30000

Data types

Pinot does not allow null values in any data type and supports the following primitive types:

Pinot	Trino
INT	INTEGER
LONG	BIGINT
FLOAT	REAL
DOUBLE	DOUBLE
STRING	VARCHAR
INT_ARRAY	VARCHAR
LONG_ARRAY	VARCHAR
FLOAT_ARRAY	VARCHAR
DOUBLE_ARRAY	VARCHAR
STRING_ARRAY	VARCHAR

SQL support

The connector provides globally available and read operation statements to access data and metadata in Pinot.

Pushdown

The connector supports pushdown for a number of operations:

• Pushdown

Aggregate pushdown for the following functions:

• avg
• approx_distinct
• count(*) and count(distinct) variations of count
• max
• min
• sum

Aggregate function pushdown is enabled by default, but can be disabled with the catalog property pinot.aggregation-pushdown.enabled or the catalog session property aggregation_pushdown_enabled.

A count(distint) pushdown may cause Pinot to run a full table scan with significant performance impact. If you encounter this problem, you can disable it with the catalog property pinot.count-distinct-pushdown.enabled or the catalog session property count_distinct_pushdown_enabled.