Query Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems

Dr. Abadi is from MIT
Recent research on column-oriented database systems (DBMSs) has shown that
these systems can outperform existing row-oriented DBMSs by one to two
orders of magnitude on read-mostly query workloads like those found in
data warehouses, decision support, and customer relationship management
systems. In this talk, I will discuss this exciting new class of database
systems and will provide an overview of the C-Store system that we have
developed over the past two years at MIT. I will then focus on the design
of the column-oriented query execution engine I have developed. In
particular, I will discuss the impact on query performance of tuple
construction (stitching together attributes from multiple columns into a
row-oriented "tuple" ) and operation on compressed data. Tuple construction
allows column-oriented DBMSs to offer a standards-compliant relational
database interface (e.g., ODBC, JDBC, etc); however, if done at the wrong
point in a query plan, a significant performance penalty is paid.
Similarly, data compression can improve query performance by an order of
magnitude by trading cheap CPU cycles for expensive I/O bandwidth.