#warehouse

Most companies' data is not big enough to justify a distributed warehouse. A single fat box running DuckDB reads Parquet and Iceberg off S3 directly and answers the median analytics query in under a second, for a fixed bill and no cold start. The big-data era was mostly oversizing.

"Zero-ETL" is the data industry's most successful rebrand of the year — and the T never went anywhere. The transformation work does not vanish, it relocates to query time or to the catalog. What is genuinely new is the collapse in data duplication, and that part is worth the hype.

A serverless warehouse that auto-provisions three nodes for a SELECT * spends most of the bill on the time you waited for it. A self-hosted ClickHouse on EC2 trades elasticity for sub-second latency and a fixed monthly line item — favourable any time queries are even mildly steady.