The Serving Layer

Concepts: paColumnarVsRow, paPartitioning

The serving layer isn't just 'analysts query a gold table.' It's a platform concern: how do you serve 15 teams with different latency requirements, access controls, and cost budgets from the same underlying data? Multi-Tenancy and Cost Attribution The hardest serving problem isn't performance - it's economics. When 15 teams query the same Snowflake warehouse, who pays? If the marketing team runs a 4-hour query that scans 50TB, does the data platform team eat the cost? The strong answer is: separate compute from storage. Use per-team virtual warehouses (Snowflake) or per-team compute clusters (Databricks). Each team's queries run on their budget. The platform team owns the shared storage layer. This is the kind of organizational design that interviews test. The Data Contract Pattern At pl