Briefs

By Lou Agosta, 13 Jul 2009 | SearchDataManagement.com

Column-oriented databases
Column-oriented analytic databases are making waves. In brief, the column-oriented database decomposes rows into individual data elements and stores one occurrence of the database element corresponding to all the rows. Since much commercial business data contains redundancies, this method of decomposition intrinsically shrinks the amount of storage -- even prior to the application of compression algorithms. However, the interface to the data is still standard SQL, and the database model is declarative, not requiring the user to manage pointers or explicit navigation. This has given impetus to products such as Sybase IQ, Sand Nucleus, Vertica and Alterian, as well as add-ons like BMMSoft, which layers metadata and functionality on top of Sybase IQ. Relatively new upstarts such as ParAccel and InfoBright are redefining what is possible with column-oriented parallel processing and data mining of metadata, respectively.

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