Read-optimized databases, in depth

Recently, a number of papers have been published showing the benefits of column stores over row stores. However, the research comparing the two in an “apples-to-apples ” way has left a number of unresolved questions. In this paper, we first discuss the factors that can affect the relative performance of each paradigm. Then, we choose points within each of the factors to study further. Our study examines five tables with various characteristics and different query workloads in order to obtain a greater understanding and quantification of the relative performance of column stores and row stores. We then add materialized views to the analysis and see how much they can help the performance of row stores. Finally, we examine the performance of hash join operations in column stores and row stores. 1