Comparison
Query costvsWarehouse sizing
Query cost
one dashboard refreshing every five minutes turned out to be a third of the monthly warehouse bill.
What a query costs in money, whether billed per byte scanned or per second of warehouse time. Making it visible per query, per user and per dashboard is the intervention that changes behaviour, because the expensive things are almost never the ones people suspect. The usual finding is that a handful of scheduled refreshes dominate, and the fix is a schedule change rather than any SQL at all.
Full entry →Warehouse sizing
you doubled the warehouse size, the query took half as long, and the bill was identical.
Choosing how much compute a workload gets, on a platform where cost is usually size multiplied by time. For a query that parallelises cleanly, a bigger warehouse is cost-neutral and finishes sooner; for one bottlenecked on a single skewed task it is pure waste. Sizing is therefore diagnostic — if doubling the size does not halve the time, the problem is skew or spill, and no amount of compute will fix it.
Full entry →