In this lightboard, Tim Berglund and Neha Pawar provide an overview of the benefits of Tiered Storage in StarTree Cloud. They highlight the differences between real-time analytics databases (like Apache Pinot, Druid, and ClickHouse) and modern data warehouses (like Spark, Presto, Trino), focusing on the costs, latency, and storage capabilities of both. Tim and Neha explain the need for a system that combines the speed of tightly-coupled systems and the cost-efficiency of decoupled systems. StarTree Cloud's Tiered Storage fulfills this need by merging the low query latency of Apache Pinot with the economical storage of decoupled systems, allowing for user-configurable historical data markers.