Make the query the identity.
SQE started as a fork of Trino with one stubborn idea: end-to-end
authentication instead of shared service accounts. Every query should run as the person
who issued it — not as trino-coordinator, not as a service principal.
From a Trino fork to a Rust engine
The audit question — “who read the customer table last Tuesday?” — was unanswerable when every query ran under the same service account. So we forked Trino to pass the user’s identity all the way through to the catalog and storage. That single constraint reshaped everything, and SQE grew into a purpose-built engine in Rust, on DataFusion and Apache Iceberg — one binary that runs embedded on a laptop or distributed across a cluster, with per-query OIDC pass-through and policy enforced at the plan layer.
A sovereign data platform
SQE is the open-source query engine (Apache-2.0, on GitHub) at the heart of a larger sovereign data platform we’re building — data infrastructure you actually own, with no shared root and no vendor lock-in. The wider platform isn’t open source yet.
Built at Schuberg Philis
by Jacob Verhoeks & Rafael Herrero