Selecting the analytical store.
WHAT THE MAIN CATEGORIES ARE
Cloud warehouses, billed by usage Self-hosted analytical databases Query engines over lake storage Single-machine analytical engines
WHAT CLOUD WAREHOUSES PROVIDE
No infrastructure to operate Elastic scaling Separation of storage and compute
WHAT THEY COST
Usage-based billing that can rise sharply Foreign-currency charges Data transfer costs
WHY THAT MATTERS HERE
Costs move with the exchange rate independently of usage, and a careless query can be expensive.
WHAT TO CONFIGURE IMMEDIATELY
Spending limits and alerts Query timeouts Scan limits per query where supported
WHAT SELF-HOSTED OPTIONS PROVIDE
Predictable cost Data remaining under your control No per-query charge
WHAT THEY COST
Operational responsibility Capacity planning
WHAT SINGLE-MACHINE ENGINES PROVIDE
Very fast analytical queries with no infrastructure at all.
WHAT THEY SUIT
Datasets up to substantial size on one machine, which covers most organisations.
WHAT TO ASSESS
Your actual volume Your team's operational capacity Whether costs are predictable enough
