ARCHIVES Query Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems

There are two obvious ways to map a two-dimension relational database table onto a one-dimensional storage in-terface: store the table row-by-row, or store the table column-by-column. Historically, database system imple-mentations and research have focused on the row-by row data layout, since it performs best on the most common application for database systems: business transactional data processing. However, there are a set of emerging applications for database systems for which the row-by-row layout performs poorly. These applications are more analytical in nature, whose goal is to read through the data to gain new insight and use it to drive decision making and planning. In this dissertation, we study the problem of poor performance of row-by-row data layout for these emerging applications, and evaluate the column-by-column data layout opportunity as a solution to this problem. There have been a variety of proposals in the literature for how to build a database system on top of column-by-column layout