Performance optimization costs something:
Compute vs storage: Materialized views use storage but save compute.
Freshness vs cost: Real-time processing costs more than hourly batch.
Complexity vs speed: Highly optimized code is harder to maintain.
Questions to ask:
- What's the actual latency requirement?
- What's the query frequency?
- Who's waiting on this data?
A dashboard viewed once daily doesn't need sub-second queries. Optimize where it matters. Leave the rest simple and cheap.