A few things I noticed. None of them alarming on their own.
Our database doubles in size every year. Not "grows a lot" — doubles.
Of its 180 GB, five tables are north of 20 GB each, and I have never run an UPDATE on a single row in any of them.
Those tables are genomic mutations — variant calls. We don't even produce them. Another service does the sequencing and the calling and hands them to us as VCF files — essentially horrible CSVs — which we unpack into rows. We just store them and show them.
Refreshing pre-production copies the whole thing across, every time, almost none of which changed since the last refresh.
