If you have found this blog post, you have stumbled upon the bowels of AWS billing, a place where the complexity and variety of options are the whole reason cloud cost management tools exist. Welcome to Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), the raw firehose of billing data that provides the most detail about service cost and consumption on AWS, with files that grow to 10s or 100s of gigabytes.

To work with CUR data, you will need to understand its schema, or data dictionary, which spans 10 tables and hundreds of columns. Fortunately, for most billing cases, only these tables will be relevant.