This whitepaper examines the limitations of traditional ETL processes that rely heavily on data movement, duplication, and rigid pipelines. It introduces distributed SQL as a way to transform data in place, minimizing replication while enabling federation across disparate systems. The document explains how reducing data movement lowers infrastructure costs, improves agility, and shortens time to insight. By leveraging query federation and separation of compute and storage, organizations can modernize analytics workflows while maintaining governance and performance. The paper positions distributed query engines as a foundational component of next-generation data architectures.

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