A columnar database has historically been useful with data warehouse systems that do complex queries over large amounts of data.
Reltio, a company I recently profiled, uses an MDM-style repository using Cassandra and a columnar database to get scale, is a great example of this trend.
All data handled by GAE must be stored in a columnar database, and even though the developer has a query language resembling SQL, it is very limited in what concerns filters.
"Our indexing technology essentially tries to bring the best of search engines and columnar databases into one.
Last year Pentaho released a version of its software that added native support for a wide range of data sources, including all the major Apache Hadoop distributions, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Hbase, columnar databases like Greenplum and Netezza and traditional relational databases like Oracle and PostgreSQL.
This "need for speed," particularly for web-related applications, has driven the development of techniques based on key-value stores and columnar databases behind portals and user interfaces, because they can be optimized for the fast retrieval of precomputed information.
They articulate for us just how critical in-memory breakthroughs are to this next phase of technological progress and describe in fascinating detail the basic design of a prototype columnar storage database that makes use of advanced compression algorithms and multi-core processing to turbocharge both analytical and transaction processing systems.
JethroData, based in Israel, combines the storage scalability of Hadoop with the query performance of a fully indexed, columnar analytic database.
But for companies that don't have a fleet of MIT-trained engineers on staff, Reltio offers a full-spectrum data management platform-as-a-service incorporating a hybrid columnar graph database and analytics in a variety of domains at an affordable price.
Alternatives include OLAP, columnar, in-database analytics, in-memory analytics, and massively parallel processing (MPP).
Of course, all prior efforts have made progress, but the problem has gotten harder lately because so many new forms of data (JSON, machine data, IoT data, variable structured data) and new repositories (object stores, NoSQL variants, such as document, columnar, key/value, graph databases, and others) have arrived.
