Internal Development Begins

A small team of engineers at Facebook (Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, David Phillips, Eric Hwang) began designing and building Presto from scratch to address the interactive query latency issues over petabyte-scale data.

Significance

Marked the genesis of a new category of distributed SQL query engines, aiming for performance metrics previously unattainable on Hadoop, directly addressing Facebook's pressing need for faster insights.