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For an enterprise lake (~38 TB Iceberg, 8.4k small files), S3 Tables managed compaction cut Athena scan spend −35% — compaction OPEX −90% vs pre–July 2025 pricing on the same workload.
Copying curated Parquet into every consumer account is how data platforms drown in storage cost and permission sprawl. On Feb 11, 2026 AWS shipped Lake Formation cross-account version 5 — wildcard RAM shares for hundreds of thousands of tables. A composite 12-account platform cut duplicate curated copies from 3 to 0 and dropped cross-account access tickets from ~11/month to ~3 by standardizing LF-Tags + resource links.
Virtual data modeling on AWS: Athena/Redshift semantic views without copies. July 2026 — when VDM works, when it burns Athena dollars.
S3 + Glue + Athena is the canonical AWS data-lake stack. It's also the one teams over-engineer the fastest. A reference architecture with the partitioning scheme, the Glue crawler config, and the Athena cost guardrails that keep query bills predictable as the lake grows.