Column-stores vs. row-stores: how different are they really?

There has been a significant amount of excitement and recent work on column-oriented database systems ("column-stores"). These database systems have been shown to perform more than an order of magnitude better than traditional row-oriented database systems ("row-stores") on analytical workloads such as those found in data warehouses, decision support, and business intelligence applications. The elevator pitch behind this performance difference is straightforward: column-stores are more I/O efficient for read-only queries since they only have to read from disk (or from memory) those attributes accessed by a query. This simplistic view leads to the assumption that one can obtain the performance benefits of a column-store using a row-store: either by vertically partitioning the schema, or by indexing every column so that columns can be accessed independently. In this paper, we demonstrate that this assumption is false. We compare the performance of a commercial row-st...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Daniel J. Abadi, Samuel Madden, Nabil Hachem
• Keywords: Column-oriented Database Systems, Column-oriented Query Execution, Database, Query Executor Level, SIGMOD 2008