Re: Column stores

[Luke Lonergan <llonergan(at)greenplum(dot)com>]

Hi Seth,

 On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 12:04 -0800, Seth Grimes wrote:
> Column stores are all the rage now in the data warehousing world as an
> alternative to traditional approaches and to MPP approaches that include
> Greenplum.  There's one company, InfoBright, that's offering a
> column-store engine, not open source, for MySQL.

That's funny - all of the column approaches that are "the rage" in DW are
MPP in addition to column store.  If people wanted a non-MPP column store
they buy Sybase IQ.

So - not only do the raging column companies have to do a new version of the
old column idea (that avoids the big drawbacks of near read-only behaviors,
specialized "projection" operations, etc), but they also have to get the MPP
part right.  Speaking from our experience - of the two, it's a lot harder to
get all the MPP parts right than it is to add a column store module.

Not that there aren't some good ideas coming from these discussions - our
point of view at Greenplum is that column store / compression isn't a
company or product, it's a feature.  Further, it's one we've also got
covered :-)

- Luke