This post is structured like a series of questions and answers in a conversation. I recently had a number of conversations that all pretty much went this same way. If you, like others, have many basic questions about how to proceed when faced with an append-only store for the first time, well then hopefully this post will help provide some answers for you. The post focuses on column stores, the most common append-only store, but there are others.
Why do I want to use a column store? Column stores are optimal for OLAP analysis
Column stores offer substantial performance increases for OLAP compared to row stores. Row stores are optimized for OLTP workloads. While a row store can be used for OLAP, it may not perform well because a row store has to retrieve every column for a row (unless there is a covering index). This is one of the reason’s that I’ve said that covering index allows you …
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