[jamesblonde]

You're basically describing the Lakehouse Tables architecture. Store your data as tabular data in Iceberg/Hudi/Delta on S3. Save a bucket on storage. Query with whatever engine you like (Snowflake, Redshift, BQ, DuckDB, etc).

[aoeusnth1]

Yes, this is the vast majority of my data work at Google as well. Spanner + Files on disk (Placer) + distributed query engine (F1) which can read anything and everything (even google sheets) and join it all.

It’s amazingly productive and incredibly cheap to operate.