On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Adam Brusselback
<adambrusselback@gmail.com> wrote:
>>It is not difficult to simulate column store in a row store system if
>>you're willing to decompose your tables into (what is essentially)
>>BCNF fragments. It simply is laborious for designers and programmers.
>
> I could see a true column store having much better performance than tricking
> a row based system into it. Just think of the per-row overhead we currently
> have at 28 bytes per row. Breaking up data manually like that may help a
> little, but if you don't have a very wide table to begin with, it could turn
> out you save next to nothing by doing so. A column store wouldn't have this
> issue, and could potentially have much better performance.
FYI tuple header is 23 bytes, not 28 bytes
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/storage-page-layout.html).
Personally I think column stores are a bit overrated. They are faster
at certain things (in some cases much faster) but tend to put pretty
onerous requirements on application design so that they are very much
a special case vehicle.
merlin
