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Data platform · Platform Concepts

Cost awareness for data platforms

Mediumplatform-22
costfinopswarehouseincremental

Question

How should data engineers think about cloud analytics cost?

Solution

Cloud warehouses and lakes bill for storage, compute scans, and sometimes data transfer. Cost-aware engineering is part of the job.

Levers

  • Partition/cluster so queries scan less
  • Materialize expensive marts instead of recomputing huge views
  • Use incremental models / merge instead of full reloads
  • Drop unused tables; set retention on raw zones
  • Avoid SELECT * mega-scans in BI extracts
  • Right-size schedules (do you need every 5 minutes?)
bad:  nightly full reload of 20 TB + ad-hoc SELECT *
good: incremental daily partition + pruned queries

Interview tip: Show you can trade freshness, complexity, and money. Mention measuring cost per job or per dashboard if asked for seniority.

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