That seems cool but paying per query (per TB scanned) frightens me. I imagine having to fret about how efficient my queries are...

It's not that bad. You can compress the data on S3 in ORC or Parquet format, and you only pay for the compressed data you read, so 1TB can be 130GB after compression. Plus, these formats store summary data, so queries like SELECT COUNT don't have to do a full table scan - they can read just a few KB of summary data for the result.

But that's a lot of work....Just to have sane costs for reads of your data

It's actually just two commands:

1. hive 2. INSERT INTO parquet_table SELECT * FROM csv_table;

I did not know about this...looks like Amazon's version of BigQuery. Fantastic!

Somehow I'd overlooked this too: nice find