# A platform team gets a $48,000 monthly Snowflake bill with no breakdown by pipeline Canonical URL: Domain: Pipeline Design ยท Difficulty: medium ## Problem A platform team gets a $48,000 monthly Snowflake bill with no breakdown by pipeline. Nobody can say which pipelines should be optimized, which should be retired, or which are growing fastest. The section's pattern: thread a stable identifier through every query the warehouse runs (Snowflake QUERY_TAG, BigQuery job labels, Databricks tags, Redshift query groups). The minimum tag set is pipeline_id and run_id; team is useful for chargeback. Tag the query by replacing the dbt build transform with one whose name states the QUERY_TAG it sets at session start, and add a cost-rollup destination that reads QUERY_HISTORY and groups credits by pipeline. ## Related - [All practice problems](https://datadriven.io/problems) - [Mock interview mode](https://datadriven.io/interview/a-platform-team-gets-a-48000-monthly-snowflake-bill-with-n-807506db) - [System Design Interview Questions](https://datadriven.io/data-engineering-system-design) - [Data Engineering Interview Prep Guide](https://datadriven.io/data-engineer-interview-prep) - [Daily Challenge](https://datadriven.io/daily) --- Source: DataDriven (https://datadriven.io). 100% free data engineering interview prep. Live code execution against Postgres 16, Python 3.11, and Spark sandboxes. No paywall, no premium tier, no signup gate.