Column-Oriented DBMS
Luke has already blogged about Vertica, so I’ll follow on with a few back ground link (thanks to a colleague). Michael Stonebraker’s Wikipedia entry identifies C-Store as the technology being commercialized by Vertica. C-Store is a read-optimized relational DBMS, different from the database we love and hate today that are write-optimized. C-Store also differs in its storage, column rather than row – pdf. Stonebraker is also involved in StreamBase – a product I blogged about last night – CEP.
MonetDB offers the same storage modem, often achieving a 10-fold raw speed improvement for SQL and XQuery over competitor RDBMSs.
Other PDF’s to read:
Tales from a Trading Desk 
Comprehending Queries! Great to see academic papers being read by people in the industry. Grust’s Comprehending Queries was one of the original papers that convinced me to read up on functional programming. My goal back then was to create a fast streaming database (today that would be vertica+streambase … or monetdb+aurora). Unfortunately, the dream is no closer to reality, but I’ve learned a fair amount 🙂
Is the column-orientation-paradigm another name for vertical partioning in traditional RDBMS?