The Hoarder's Warehouse (Touch a Table, Take a Table)

You hear it all the time from data engineers: "Touch a table, take a table." Sounds efficient, right? Just ingest the whole thing, every column, every row. Easy. Except now your data warehouse is a hoarder's nightmare. You've got 847 columns across 50 tables and nobody knows what 80% of them are. "customer_legacy_flag_2" sits there taking up space, covered in metaphorical cobwebs, never used in a single dashboard or analysis. But you're paying to store it. You're paying to process it. And worse—it's cluttering your shelves, making it harder for analysts to find what they actually need. It's like a manufacturing plant storing every scrap of raw material that ever entered the building "just in case." Meanwhile, the useful materials are buried under junk and workers waste hours digging through garbage to find what they need.