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Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really?

Summary: Column-stores outperform row-stores on analytics; vertical partitioning cannot bridge the gap. The paper dissects executor-level factors, showing gains from vectorized execution, compression, and a new join algorithm, arguing that realizing column-store benefits requires changes to both storage and the query engine. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
4108
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2008
Pagerank
0.00020656723
Overall Rank
345 | 97.64%
DOI
10.1145/1376616.1376712

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{abadi_sigmod08,
        title = {{Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really?}},
        author = {Abadi, Daniel J. and Madden, Samuel R. and Hachem, Nabil},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '08},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1376616.1376712},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1376616.1376712},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 60 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
66 The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse 2016 SIGMOD 0.00038561587
412 Processing Analytical Queries over Encrypted Data 2013 VLDB 0.00018901853
534 Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language 2014 VLDB 0.00017046514
823 The Yin and Yang of Processing Data Warehousing Queries on GPU Devices 2013 VLDB 0.00013792901
1,199 Bridging the Archipelago between Row-Stores and Column-Stores for Hybrid Workloads 2016 SIGMOD 0.00011703966
1,225 Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click 2012 VLDB 0.00011590013
1,242 Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store 2014 SIGMOD 0.00011516162
1,367 H2O: A Hands-free Adaptive Store 2014 SIGMOD 0.00011014419
1,379 Relaxed Operator Fusion for In-Memory Databases: Making Compilation, Vectorization, and Prefetching Work Together At Last 2018 VLDB 0.00010970894
1,395 Column-oriented Database Systems 2009 VLDB 0.00010928358
1,455 Query Processing Techniques for Solid State Drives 2009 SIGMOD 0.00010733981
1,666 HippogriffDB: Balancing I/O and GPU Bandwidth in Big Data Analytics 2016 VLDB 0.00010068964
1,747 SQL Server Column Store Indexes 2011 SIGMOD 9.8494706e-05
1,791 Cheetah: A High Performance, Custom Data Warehouse on Top of MapReduce 2010 VLDB 9.7470504e-05
2,156 Quickstep: A Data Platform Based on the Scaling-Up Approach 2018 VLDB 9.0635624e-05
2,232 Database Compression on Graphics Processors 2010 VLDB 8.8970926e-05
2,563 AnalyticDB: Real-time OLAP Database System at Alibaba Cloud 2019 VLDB 8.412445e-05
2,686 On Improving User Response Times in Tableau 2015 SIGMOD 8.25822e-05
2,713 Robust Query Processing in Co-Processor-accelerated Databases 2016 SIGMOD 8.2122726e-05
2,849 Column-Oriented Storage Techniques for MapReduce 2011 VLDB 8.053191e-05
3,169 Towards Demystifying Serverless Machine Learning Training 2021 SIGMOD 7.6715222e-05
3,230 An Analytic Data Engine for Visualization in Tableau 2011 SIGMOD 7.6208919e-05
3,357 Columnar Storage and List-based Processing for Graph Database Management Systems 2021 VLDB 7.4904874e-05
3,489 Read-Optimized Databases, In Depth 2008 VLDB 7.3670717e-05
3,647 Maximizing Persistent Memory Bandwidth Utilization for OLAP Workloads 2021 SIGMOD 7.2271935e-05
3,902 The Impact of Columnar In-Memory Databases on Enterprise Systems: Implications of Eliminating Transaction-Maintained Aggregates 2014 VLDB 7.0313122e-05
4,058 Fast Scans on Key-Value Stores 2017 VLDB 6.9335663e-05
4,089 TCUDB: Accelerating Database with Tensor Processors 2022 SIGMOD 6.9096857e-05
4,329 Dimensions Based Data Clustering and Zone Maps 2017 VLDB 6.75682e-05
4,603 The Art of Balance: A RateupDB Experience of Building a CPU/GPU Hybrid Database Product 2021 VLDB 6.6105578e-05
4,637 Columnstore and B+ tree – Are Hybrid Physical Designs Important? 2018 SIGMOD 6.592197e-05
4,892 Fast In-Memory SQL Analytics on Typed Graphs 2017 VLDB 6.4574091e-05
5,037 A Deep Dive into Common Open Formats for Analytical DBMSs 2023 VLDB 6.3914026e-05
5,345 PS2: Parameter Server on Spark 2019 SIGMOD 6.2586047e-05
5,589 An Experimental Evaluation of Large Scale GBDT Systems 2019 VLDB 6.1559057e-05
5,715 Design and Evaluation of Storage Organizations for Read-Optimized Main Memory Databases 2013 VLDB 6.1105343e-05
5,812 MCJoin: A Memory-Constrained Join for Column-Store Main-Memory Databases. 2012 SIGMOD 6.0782357e-05
5,926 Teaching an Old Elephant New Tricks 2009 CIDR 6.0388444e-05
6,264 Mainlining Databases: Supporting Fast Transactional Workloads on Universal Columnar Data File Formats 2021 VLDB 5.9357781e-05
6,480 Proteus: Autonomous Adaptive Storage for Mixed Workloads 2022 SIGMOD 5.8669819e-05
6,835 GPU-accelerated data management under the test of time 2020 CIDR 5.7584924e-05
6,848 Jigsaw: A Data Storage and Query Processing Engine for Irregular Table Partitioning 2021 SIGMOD 5.7550624e-05
6,896 Wide Table Layout Optimization based on Column Ordering and Duplication 2017 SIGMOD 5.7440611e-05
7,285 Bullion: A Column Store for Machine Learning 2025 CIDR 5.6559604e-05
8,202 Cubrick: Indexing Millions of Records per Second for Interactive Analytics 2016 VLDB 5.4672903e-05
8,318 Optimizing Declarative Graph Queries at Large Scale 2019 SIGMOD 5.4548766e-05
8,708 Extending Polaris to Support Transactions 2024 SIGMOD 5.3794896e-05
8,783 Tiresias: Enabling Predictive Autonomous Storage and Indexing 2022 VLDB 5.3740362e-05
9,675 BlockJoin: Efficient Matrix Partitioning Through Joins 2017 VLDB 5.2380072e-05
10,063 Keep Your Distributed Data Warehouse Consistent at a Minimal Cost 2023 SIGMOD 5.1650158e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

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