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SQL queries

Under Daten → Abfragen (data → queries) sits a SQL worksheet over Trino. Every statement runs under your identity — what you see here is exactly what Trino shows you.

On this page

Reads run, writes ask first

Every statement is classified before it runs, fail-closed. Reads go straight through, writes after a confirmation.

Finding objects

Addressing is three-part: catalog, schema, table. A fresh installation's catalog is called iceberg; alongside it sit Trino's own catalogs system, jmx and memory, plus the sample data in tpch and tpcds.

What is there?
SHOW CATALOGS;
SHOW SCHEMAS FROM iceberg;
SHOW TABLES FROM iceberg.produkte;
DESCRIBE iceberg.produkte.produkte;

Querying

From here on it is ordinary SQL. The example below works on the table from the data browser — article number, description, category, net price, VAT rate and stock.

Gross price per category
SELECT
    kategorie,
    count(*)                                        AS artikel,
    round(avg(preis_netto_eur * (1 + mwst_prozent / 100.0)), 2) AS brutto_schnitt,
    sum(lagerbestand)                               AS bestand
FROM iceberg.produkte.produkte
WHERE lagerbestand > 0
GROUP BY kategorie
ORDER BY brutto_schnitt DESC;

The same limits everywhere

A row hidden by policy is missing here just as in search or a BI extract — Trino appends the condition, not the interface.

Travelling back in time

Iceberg does not rewrite rows; it writes new snapshots, and Nessie keeps them. Any table can therefore be queried as it looked at an earlier point in time — no backup, no copy.

Listing snapshots and querying one
-- Which states exist?
SELECT snapshot_id, committed_at, operation
FROM iceberg.produkte."produkte$snapshots"
ORDER BY committed_at DESC;

-- Yesterday morning
SELECT count(*) AS zeilen
FROM iceberg.produkte.produkte
FOR TIMESTAMP AS OF TIMESTAMP '2026-09-03 08:00:00 Europe/Berlin';

-- Or one particular snapshot
SELECT *
FROM iceberg.produkte.produkte
FOR VERSION AS OF 8623201004411246578
LIMIT 20;

Besides $snapshots there are further metadata tables of the same shape: $history shows the sequence of states, $files the data files behind the current one, $partitions their distribution. The quotes are required — without them Trino does not read the dollar sign as part of the name.

Creating a view

Views are the intended way to make an analysis reusable — and the only way to get one into the BI feed: the feed accepts no SQL from the caller, only the name of an object. Whatever Tableau should compute is therefore stored here as a view first.

A view for the BI extract
CREATE VIEW iceberg.produkte.v_bestandswert AS
SELECT
    artikelnummer,
    bezeichnung,
    kategorie,
    lagerbestand,
    preis_netto_eur,
    lagerbestand * preis_netto_eur AS bestandswert_netto
FROM iceberg.produkte.produkte;

CREATE VIEW is a writing statement

It needs a confirmation and the grants in Trino. The view inherits no rights of its own — whoever queries it does so under their own identity.

What has its own route

  • Metrics and semantic views: maintained under KI & Semantik → Kennzahlen and queried by name.
  • Bulk loading: that is what the five ingestion paths are for, with an assistant instead of hand-written INSERTs.
  • The catalog itself: the installation brings it along; it is not created in SQL.

Applies to: This page describes lavalake 0.16.0. Product and documentation live in separate repositories — when in doubt, what the console shows is authoritative.

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