Five Questions Before Your First Warehouse

The warehouse demo shows a fast query on clean data. Month six looks different.

Asking about your situation isn’t the demo’s job.

The five I’d want answered first:

1. Who runs this day to day? If the answer is “the backend team, on the side”, pick the most managed option and keep it small.
2. Which three questions does it have to answer first? Name them. If you can’t, you’re buying ahead of the problem.
3. How does data get in? Check whether it’s connectors, CDC or file drops. Ingestion is often where the cost and the breakage live.
4. What does a bad month cost? Ask for the bill at 3x your current volume, and what limits exist to cap it.
5. How do you leave? Check the export options and whether it uses open table formats, then find out how much of your logic would end up in vendor-specific SQL.

Most teams answer the first one last, if at all. I’d start there.

Most of this fits in an afternoon with your CTO and a whiteboard, before you’ve hired anyone for data.

Which of the five would your team struggle to answer today?