[manigandham]

It's not so difficult if you control the data. Snowflake offers a relational datawarehouse built on EC2/S3 (and now other clouds) with its own column-oriented data format (a hybrid called PAX). It can seek to the right columns and rows by getting the exact byte ranges from an S3 object.

[jakebol]

this is true (and a property of all? cloud formats Delta, Hudi, Iceberg, parquet, etc.)

I was referring more to the fact that the cloud vendors can co-design their infrastructure and software to support their database services.