Why Enterprise Data Warehouses Are Losing to Lightweight OLAP Solutions

Cloud data warehouses like Snowflake are engineered for petabyte-scale enterprises, leaving smaller teams with architectural overkill and unpredictable six-figure bills. DuckDB offers a practical alternative, handling sub-terabyte analytics locally without infrastructure overhead—fundamentally reshaping the economics of data analysis. This shift challenges the conventional wisdom that bigger tools are always better, signaling a critical reassessment of how organizations match infrastructure to actual workload requirements.