A diamond in the rough: Theorizing column stores

Talk by Eyal Rozenberg

Location: APB 3105
Start: 21. November 2019 at 1:00 pm
End: 21. November 2019 at 2:30 pm
Event series: KBS Seminar
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Column stores have been a 'neglected child' relative to traditional, row-oriented, relation-focused database management systems: The systems people came up with them, and the theoreticians did not really give them the time of day. This talk will discuss what happens when we pick up the slack and formalize a model for analytic computation with columns. In addition to sound conceptual grounding being its own aesthetic reward, we will touch on some of the examples of how such a formalization enables architectural and performance improvements in real-life systems:

Seamless integration of decompression and query execution; removal of special-case handling of different column features (such as nullability and variable-length elements); closure of query execution plans to partial execution; et cetera. Central to achieving such benefits will be the discussion of what constitutes a column, how columns are to be represented, and what they can represent.