How Software Bloat Quietly Undermines Data Efficiency

Imagine this: you’re scaling your data infrastructure and need a BI platform that can support your existing ecosystem without introducing unnecessary complexity. To build a long-term data strategy, you evaluate both a vendor’s technical architecture and its business model. 

If that model is consumption-based, it’s worth looking deeper into the potential caveats. 

In theory, consumption pricing charges customers only for what they use based on metrics like storage, API calls, or compute time. In practice, this is where software bloat becomes profitable for vendors. 

Unpredictability isn’t a flaw in these systems. It’s the mechanism. 

Vendors often rely on unpredictability to inflate consumption-based prices. That unpredictability is sustained through choices such as: 

• Default Timeouts: Query timeouts are often set to 48 hours. A one-hour timeout would protect users, but a 48-hour runaway query ensures you pay for every minute it runs. One poorly written query can quietly burn compute for days. 
• Infrastructure Abstraction: By hiding servers, CPUs, and memory behind simplified interfaces, platforms make it easy to forget that every SQL command triggers multiple cost vectors. Leaders lose visibility into which teams, dashboards, or workloads are driving spend, and the system keeps leaking money. 
• Arbitrary Scaling: Teams are encouraged to upsize warehouses “for speed.” Moving from Medium to Large can instantly double costs without delivering proportional performance gains. Performance problems get solved by spending instead of understanding.

Software bloat in the data layer typically stems from three architectural failures: 

1. Query Sprawl: When BI tools or unmanaged users fire off redundant, unoptimized queries, warehouses spin up repeatedly to answer the same question. Without intelligent caching, ten dashboard refreshes mean ten full compute cycles instead of one. 
2. The Zombie Pipeline: Scheduled ETL jobs that no longer serve a business purpose but continue to run. The dashboard was deprecated, the team moved on, but the pipeline lives. Because jobs succeed in logs, they silently drain budgets. 
3. Inefficient Data Movement: Many teams pull data out of warehouses into separate application memory for processing. This is the opposite of query pushdown. Logic runs in the least efficient layer, inflating compute costs unnecessarily. 

If left unaddressed, software bloat creates risks that extend far beyond a single monthly bill. 

Strategy Mosaic is a universal semantic layer designed to sit independently between your data sources and your users. Beyond unifying definitions and business logic, it also functions as a compute arbitrage layer. 

Instead of letting every user query hit an expensive cloud warehouse directly, Mosaic evaluates each request and determines the most cost-effective execution path. 

1. Fixed Cost Caching 

Mosaic’s pricing is user-based, not consumption-based. When the first user opens a dashboard, Mosaic fetches and caches the data. When the next 49 users open that same dashboard, the query hits Mosaic’s memory, not your warehouse. You replace variable, unpredictable spend with a fixed model. 

2. Intelligent Query Pushdown 

In traditional architectures, joining data from platforms like Databricks and SQL databases often requires egressing data into a third system, incurring both compute and transfer costs.  

Mosaic analyzes each query and pushes execution to the cheapest, most efficient option. You pay compute only where it’s necessary, and only for the slice of data that needs it. 

3. Deep Usage Intelligence 

Through Mosaic Sentinel, the platform tracks which semantic models and objects are actually being used. If a complex transformation runs hourly but hasn’t been queried in 30 days, Sentinel flags it. You can kill the pipeline immediately and stop zombie spend at the source. 

Cloud vendors rely on lock-in through proprietary formats and tightly coupled logic.  
Strategy Mosaic is vendor-neutral. It decouples your business logic (how you define "Revenue" or "Churn") from the underlying database. 

If a provider raises prices, Mosaic allows you to migrate to a cheaper alternative without re-architecting models or breaking dashboards. Your BI tools and downstream applications remain connected to centralized logic, not vendor-specific infrastructure. 

Cloud data platforms aren’t designed to control software bloat. They monetize it. 

Strategy Mosaic addresses the problem at the architectural level by enforcing one semantic layer and one source of truth.   

The result: More focus on insights. Less money is burned on invisible infrastructure costs. 

You keep the benefits of your existing data platforms, without letting them dictate your spend.