The shift from managed warehouses to cloud-native formats makes a lot of sense. MotherDuck's DuckDB approach eliminates friction of moving data between systems—query directly from cloud storage (S3, GCS) without loading into separate compute. Relevant context: Redshift Spectrum does similar things, but DuckDB's cost model (~$1/TB scanned) often outperforms for ad-hoc queries where you're not maintaining a live warehouse. For production analytics with concurrent users + strict isolation, Redshift/BQ still win on reliability, but for data exploration & lightweight dashboards, this model is hard to beat. The real win is not having to make an all-or-nothing choice anymore.