Last month, MariaDB officially released MariaDB ColumnStore, their column store engine for MySQL. This post discusses what it is (and isn’t), why it matters and how you can approach a test of it.

What is ColumnStore?

ColumnStore is a storage engine that turns traditional MySQL storage concepts on their head. Instead of storing the data by row, a column store stores the data by column (obviously). This provides advantages for certain types of data, and certain types of queries run against that data. See my previous post for more details on column-based storage systems.

ColumnStore is a fork of InfiniDB and carries forward many of the concepts behind that product. InfiniDB ceased operations in 2014. With the front end managed through MariaDB, you get access to …