Column-Stores For Wide and Sparse Data

While it is generally accepted that data warehouses and OLAP workloads are excellent applications for column-stores, this paper speculates that column-stores may well be suited for additional applications. In particular we observe that column-stores do not see a performance degradation when storing extremely wide tables, and column-stores handle sparse data very well. These two properties lead us to conjecture that column-stores may be good storage layers for Semantic Web data, XML data, and data with GEM-style schemas. 1