Disk trends will drive the need for column stores

October 1, 2007

In a recent post, Sam Madden explained the benefits that column-store architecture offers decision support applications. Summarizing briefly, columns stores have two significant advantages over row stores for such applications: First, only the columns needed by a query need to be read from disk; second, column stores, by their very nature, can be compressed much more effectively than row stores.

The article continues at http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/disk-trends.html