Please check out the new blog post Vertical, sure – but how lean can it be? by volkerstoeffler where he discusses how the vertical or columnar storage architecture for RDBMS used in Data Warehouse / Business Analysis scenarios is not the end of the story. There are ways to further slice these values, and the article is intended to show the impact of these data structures on the performance and – more important – the scalability of a certain pattern of queries...
