Yes the final run, establishing the record, costed $242. I would love to know what the total compute costs for this project was. In real world situations, you run this query daily, or at least multiple times to fine tune it. The point still stands that I can't afford to run on this type of hardware, as it is too expensive, nor do I have such heavy workloads, so these results are not relevant.
yes, but it's a best thing of the cloud - your cluster doesn't run when you don't need it, plus you can advantages of spot instances, autoscaling, etc.. And you won't do TPC test each every half an hour.
