Sunday, October 31, 2010

Column Store DBMS

By its name, contents are stored by column. Sybase maybe the earliest commercial products implementing column store. Vertica and its academic precursor C-store are now a mature commercial product.

Benefits and challenges:
- Query optimization: when queries involving adding a new column for all rows, aggregating along only a few columns, column store will be much more effective.It is especially advantagerous for data warehourse, as queries are often on some specific dimentions of the data.
- High compression is possible as columns of homogeneous datatype are stored together.

In general, OLTP is more row-oriented, while OLAP is more column-oriented. Combined row and column store provides exceptional benefits and challanges in the above mentioned areas. The system level design also give more oppotunities in parallelism and failure recovery, if we take different store mechanism in the RAID or fallback protection. Aster Data, another successful startup company, claimed it has the hybrid row and column store architecture.

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