Warehouse Fundamentals — ScreeningA phone-screen round on how cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery) actually work. Answer from the architecture, not folklore.

What does 'separation of storage and compute' mean in a cloud warehouse?

Why can the second run of an identical query return instantly?

With no indexes, what makes a filtered query fast in a warehouse?

A query profile shows 'bytes spilled to remote storage'. What happened?

A join takes 2M and 5M input rows and outputs 900M rows. Most likely cause?

Queries are slow every morning; profiles show normal execution time but long total elapsed time. What's wrong?

Doubling a Snowflake warehouse size (e.g. L to XL) does what to cost?