What’s so Special about a Column Store Database
I started working with databases over 25 years ago. In the beginning there was CODASYL and Hierarchial databases, but along came Relational and we were convinced that it could do everything and products like Oracle have been available for over 30 years, so they are obviously an extremely useful business tool. So why after all this time would anyone want a column-store database?
What’s interesting about column-store database products is that they don’t claim to be a one size fit all solution, instead they target specific business areas such as analytics. Whilst relational databases can also perform this task, the advantage of using a column-store product like Vertica is that data compression can be as high as 90%. Therefore you can either store much more data or use considerably less storage than a traditional system. Performance gains could be as much as 200x faster than your current system and you can achieve this on a low-cost hardware platform.
Over the years we have learnt about how to improve the capabilities within database systems, but in traditional systems its not always easy to implement a new approach. Where as new products like Vertica can design these new techniques into their product thus you are using a product really designed for today’s technology.
The column-store database is still queried using SQL, there is still a schema to design and a database to be tuned. Its just fun looking at it from a column perspective rather than always thinking about the entire row.
I am really enjoying taking all the skills and experience that I have gathered over the years and applying it to Vertica, but also there are new techniques and approaches to learn. So it just goes to prove that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
Next time we will look in more detail about what makes a column store different