Column Oriented Database

A columnar database specifically designed for data warehousing, business intelligence, analytics and any other read-intensive application deployment.  This database can be used and  on a single, stand-alone server with the ability to service several terabytes of data, or it can be deployed against multiple servers in a distributed, MPP-enabled, highly available fashion with unlimited scalability.

IN the last few years we have seen many column-oriented database systems, There has been a lot of research and great white papers that explain how the introduction of the column oriented database has an advantage in several areas over the status quo "row oriented" database. The authors of these systems claim that their approach offers a 'order of magnitude' gains on certain workloads, particularly on read-intensive BI and analytical processing workloads, such as those encountered in data warehouses. Indeed, papers describing column-oriented database systems usually include performance results showing such gains against traditional, row-oriented databases (both commercial or open source).
Take heed from these evaluations as they are typically bias evaluations, however, the benchmark against the more typical row database processing that use a “conventional” physical design consisting of a collection of row-oriented tables in the database  with a using only a row to row comparison of the data and does not take into account an entire warehouse as a test to make these claims for instance mapping the entire database for which a more trustworthy opinion and paper might provide.

I would like to throw to YOU your observations on the suject. Anyone thta has tried this I would be very happy to get your comment on this page - even your results to testing thi very NEW debate!!!