The problem. Ingestion solved getting data in. It did not solve anyone being able to use it. Analysts were querying close to raw tables, which meant every dashboard encoded its own quiet interpretation of what a metric meant, and two dashboards could disagree without either being wrong. Query cost and query time were both climbing for reasons nobody could point at.

The architecture. Curated data lands in Redshift as modelled tables rather than as mirrors of the source systems. Denodo sits above that as a virtualization layer, so consumers hit one consistent surface instead of learning which physical table is the current one. QuickSight reads from there. Storage stays tiered across S3 and Redshift by how often something is actually touched, which is where most of the cost reduction came from — roughly 30% lower storage cost, without deleting anything anyone still needed.

The interesting decision. Putting a virtualization tier in front of the warehouse instead of just publishing more views. Views would have been simpler and one fewer system to run. The argument for Denodo was that it decouples what consumers depend on from what the platform is physically doing, so a migration underneath does not become a coordination problem with every dashboard owner in the company. That is a bet on future change being likely — a reasonable engineer could have taken the other side of it and been right for a couple of years.

Analysts were querying close to raw tables, so every dashboard encoded its own quiet interpretation of what a metric meant — two of them could disagree without either being wrong. Query times and storage costs were both climbing, and nobody could point at the reason.

Modelled the curated layer in Redshift and put Denodo in front of it, so consumers depend on one surface instead of learning which physical table is the current one. Performance tuning brought query execution times down by about 35%; tiering storage across S3 and Redshift by how often something is actually touched cut storage cost by about 30%, without deleting anything anyone still needed.