Vectorwise: Beyond Column Stores

This paper tells the story of Vectorwise, a high-performance analytical database system, from multiple perspectives: its history from academic project to commercial product, the evolution of its technical architecture, customer reactions to the product and its future research and development roadmap. One take-away from this story is that the novelty in Vectorwise is much more than just column-storage: it boasts many query processing innovations in its vectorized execution model, and an adaptive mixed row/column data storage model with indexing support tailored to analytical workloads. Another one is that there is a long road from research prototype to commercial product, though database research continues to achieve a strong innovative influence on product development.