Smarter Week

How to automate it

How to automate “track down expensive queries and warehouse costs”

Here is the best way to spend less time on this, best first. Each comes with steps you can follow today.

60 min
typically, once a month
50%
of the time can be automated
Some setup
to set up

Fix 1 of 1

Software feature

Use warehouse cost views and alerts to find expensive queries

Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks have built-in cost and query history views, and tools like Select.dev show which models and dashboards cost the most.

Typically saves about 45% of the time2 h to set up
  1. 1Turn on the cost dashboards in your warehouse and tag queries by team or tool.
  2. 2Set budgets and alerts (Snowflake resource monitors and budgets, BigQuery quotas, Databricks budgets).
  3. 3Review the top 10 most expensive queries monthly and assign owners.
  4. 4Ask an AI SQL assistant to suggest optimizations for each.

Tools: Snowflake cost management · BigQuery INFORMATION_SCHEMA and quotas · Databricks system tables · Select.dev

Who does this task

Roles in our library that list this as one of their common tasks. Each guide covers the rest of that role’s week.

Data engineer

HourLeak · the 8-minute work audit

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