Another question I've been wondering about is this idea of both realtime and offline tables being queried at once, via the same table name. Does anyone have an interesting use case for when they've used this? I'm trying to wrap my head around one

Yes this is a very common pattern. What’s your question on this one?

really just trying to imagine where this would be useful. in my cases, our streaming data sources are usually so different from our batched data, I'm wondering why I'd want to query them at the same time

By example you mean a config setup? Or just want to know who is running it?

latter, just a scenario in which it makes sense

I think many of LinkedIn’s use cases follow that pattern. For example, “who viewed my profile” that is powered by Pinot follows that

ahhh yeah totally. ty!