Lecture 15: C-Store

Read:

Stonebraker, Michael, et al. C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS. Proceedings of the 31st VLDB Conference, 2005. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)

This paper discusses the C-Store system, which is a read-optimized database system with a novel physical arrangement of data on disk, as well as an unusual approach to recovery and query processing

As you read the paper, consider the following questions:

  1. Why does the C-Store idea of arranging data as columns improve query performance?
  2. How does C-Store propose to do recovery? Is there an advantage to this approach?
  3. How does C-Store isolate transactions? Do you think this is a good idea?