We were told to scale compute. But what if the real problem was never about big data, but about bad data access? In this talk, we’ll unpack two powerful, often misunderstood techniques—projection pushdown and predicate pushdown—and why they matter more than ever in a world where we want lightweight, fast queries over large datasets. These optimizations aren’t just academic—they’re the difference between querying a terabyte in seconds vs. minutes. We’ll show how systems like Flink and DuckDB leverage these techniques, what limits them (hello, Protobuf), and how smart schema and storage design—especially in formats like Iceberg and Arrow can unlock dramatic speed gains. Along the way, we’ll highlight the importance of landing data in queryable formats, and why indexing and query engines matter just as much as compute. This talk is for anyone who wants to stop fully scanning their data lakes just to read one field.