October 2013
Beginner to intermediate
244 pages
5h 53m
English
This chapter discusses columnar databases, which use a nontraditional storage model. Columnar databases use traditional structured data and often run some version of SQL. The difference is in how they store the data. The traditional row-oriented approach is replaced by putting data in columns that can be assembled back into the familiar rows of an RDBMS model. Since columns are drawn from one and only one data type and domain, they can be compressed for faster access, and columns are easier to share among multiple users and distribute over modern redundant hardware storage systems, such as RAID.
columnar data storage; hashing; MPP (massively parallel processing); multidimensional database (MDB); OLAP ...