when to activate photon and when not to ?

[Enrique1987]

Photon appears as an option to check and uncheck as appropriate.

The use of Photon leads to higher consumption of DBUs and higher costs.
At what point does it pay off and when not to enable it.
More costs for the use of photon, but at the same time less computation time would incur less costs in the end.

How do you calculate when to use it and when not to use it? Do you have to go case by case seeing how much it costs activated and not activated or is there some other trick to take into account.

which is more cost effective in economic terms, if you need more computing power, increase the size of your cluster or enable photon?

[jacovangelder · Accepted solution]

This is my own experience: For SQL workloads, with not too many joins, it will speed things up. For building facts and dimensions using many joins, I found Photon to increase costs by a lot, while not bringing much better performance. 

The only real way of determining if it will benefit you is by comparing processing times with photon enabled and photon disabled. If the speed is not at least 2x faster, I would not recommend it, as it doubles the DBUs.