Re: stonebraker diffs RDBMS

[Brian Hurt <bhurt(at)janestcapital(dot)com>]

Robert Bernier wrote:

> Two links here, comments anybody?
>
> http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/databases/news/index.cfm?newsid=5059
>
> http://www.databasecolumn.com/
>
> Robert
>
>  

OK, I'm being stupid here- can someone please explain to me the 
difference between a column-oriented database and a fully normalized 
row-oriented database?  Most databases are insufficiently normalized, 
this I know (including mine).  And this causes pain.  But it seems to me 
that full normalized (aka column-oriented) databases also cause pain, 
just a different type of pain.  Collecting rows I'm very likely to all 
want together onto the same page strikes me as being a signifigant 
performance advantage.  Having to read in a page for every column- or 
worse yet, O(log N) pages for each column (as I have to traverse an 
index)- strikes me as being a huge performance hit.

But maybe I'm not seeing something, and someone can enlighten me.

Brian