Google Cloud Platform for Architects

Columnar datastore

A columnar database is a database management system (DBMS) that stores data in columns instead of rows. Here, all the column one values are physically together, followed by all the column two values, and so on. The data is stored in record order, so the 100th entry for column one and the 100th entry for column two belong to the same input record. This allows individual data elements, such as customer name for instance, to be accessed in columns as a group, rather than individually row by row.

Say you have the data from a notification service in an e-commerce website. Notifications will have properties like ID, recipient, the notification type (an offer or a sale notification), and the message content. In a traditional relational ...