September 2007 Archives

Despite massive increases in capacity and major reductions in cost, today's high capacity disk drives and their decreasing effective transfer bandwidth will drive users to more efficient column stores. Contributor David DeWitt explains how this transfer bandwidth challenge actually makes it slower to fully scan a typical 10 TB data warehouse today then it did years ago. Continue reading "Disk trends will drive the need for column stores" »

In a recent post, a reader made the following comments: OODBs failed because RDBMS vendors added OO functionality; data warehouse users are not in pain; column stores only beat row stores on poorly designed warehouse schemas. In Mike Stonebraker's opinion, all three claims are false. Continue reading "Stonebraker comments on OODB market failures, data warehouse pain, and column advantages" »

In regards to an earlier post about the advantages of compression in column-oriented databases, a commenter asked about maintaining the correspondence between columns in a column-oriented database. Sam Madden discusses how the issue isn't really "getting the data back in the original order" as much as it is ensuring that the system has a way of accessing records in other columns that correspond to a particular record in a sorted column. Continue reading "Follow up on compression post: Columns, indices, and sorting" »

One of the key performance features of column databases that Mike mentioned in his previous post was the aggressive use of data compression. In this post, we'll discuss how column-oriented databases are able to more effectively exploit compression than a typical row-oriented system. There are two key points: 1) Columns of data from the same attribute compress better than rows of tuples in a table; and 2) A well-architected database engine using appropriate compression techniques can operate directly on the compressed data, without decompressing it. Continue reading "Good things come in small packages: The advantage of compression in column databases" »

Since the 1970s, new DBMS application areas have emerged with very different requirements than OLTP, but none of the major vendors have performed a complete redesign to deal with this changed landscape. Mike Stonebraker discusses how users can now experience blindingly fast data warehouse performance using column-oriented databases. Continue reading "One size fits all: A concept whose time has come and gone" »

The database industry, like much of the enterprise software industry, has gone through some radical changes over the past few years:The growth of databases and the resulting storage and access demands.The maturation of open source database software.Core database technology innovation, such as column-based solutions.The ever-increasing need to quickly analyze and... Continue reading "Welcome to "The Database Column"" »

The Database Column has seven primary contributors, all experts in the database field. Click on their names for more in-depth information.Mike Stonebraker is a co-founder and the CTO of Vertica Systems, the company that publishes this blog. He was the architect behind INGRES and POSTGRES and was a professor of... Continue reading "A look at The Database Column contributors" »

Mr. Haderle, also known as "The Father of DB2", joined IBM in 1968 as a software developer and retired in 2005 as the software executive operating as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Information Management segment which constitutes a $3-4B portfolio of products covering Database Management and Content Management.Mr. Haderle... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: Don Haderle" »

Dr. Stonebraker is a co-founder and the CTO of Vertica Systems. He has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: Michael Stonebraker" »

Jerry Held, Ph.D., is currently Chairman of the Board of Vertica Systems and the CEO of the Held Consulting Group which provides strategic consulting to CEOs and senior executives of technology firms ranging from startups to very large organizations as well as major private equity firms. Dr. Held also serves... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: Jerry Held" »

Dr. Zdonik is a professor of computer science at Brown University, where he has led the Advanced Data Management Research Group since 1983. He and his team have been involved in a diverse set of research activities including research into object-oriented database systems, semantic query optimization, transaction management, network information... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: Stan Zdonik" »

Dr. Madden is an Associate Professor in the EECS department at MIT and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests span all areas of database systems; past projects include the TinyDB system for data collection from sensor networks and the Telegraph adaptive query... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: Samuel Madden" »

David J. DeWitt joined the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin in September 1976 after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. He served as department chair for five years from July 1999 to July 2004 and is currently the John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: David DeWitt" »

Dr. Cherniack is currently an associate professor of computer science at Brandeis University. He has published numerous research papers about database systems, and specifically, in the areas of query optimization, profile-driven data management and stream processing systems. He was the winner of the prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science... Continue reading "Database Column contributor: Mitch Cherniack" »