The optimizations are no doubt impressive, but looking at it from a costs perspective – they run their company on two DB instances, each with two CPU cores and 4 GB of ram. The annual cost of running such a machine on AWS (with SSD included) is ~$4000. Even if their DB infra was only half as efficient as it is today, their costs would increase by a whopping $8000/yr.
How much do they pay an average software developer? How many hours have developers spent on query monitoring, optimization, removing joins, removing aggregations? What is the ongoing cost of learning and applying these techniques to all new code written at the company? Even with the most conservative estimates I'm confident that it costs them several orders of magnitude more in developer productivity than they are saving on hardware.
Optimization is good, but every company needs to recognize where they are throwing away dollars to save cents. There is an optimal level of inefficiency that companies want to have.
How much do they pay an average software developer? How many hours have developers spent on query monitoring, optimization, removing joins, removing aggregations? What is the ongoing cost of learning and applying these techniques to all new code written at the company? Even with the most conservative estimates I'm confident that it costs them several orders of magnitude more in developer productivity than they are saving on hardware.
Optimization is good, but every company needs to recognize where they are throwing away dollars to save cents. There is an optimal level of inefficiency that companies want to have.