abadi column stores.pdf

In this article, we survey recent research on column-oriented database systems, or column-stores, where each attribute of a table is stored in a separate file or region on storage. Such databases have seen a resur- gence in recent years with a rise in interest in analytic queries that perform scans and aggregates over large portions of a few columns of a table. The main advantage of a column-store is that it can access just the columns needed to answer such queries. We specifically focus on three influential research prototypes, MonetDB [46], VectorWise [18], and C-Store [88]. These systems have formed the basis for several well- known commercial column-store implementations. We describe their similarities and dierences and discuss their specific architectural fea- tures for compression, late materialization, join processing, vectoriza- tion and adaptive indexing (database cracking).