Product Information
Column store is now the default table type for SAP HANA
There are already plenty of blogs explaining the benefits of using column store over row store for SAP HANA. I have just listed a few
Also, SAP HANA document have explained the principle of the two table types Row vs Column and which type is recommended based on usage criteria. It explains that Row stores are suitable a table having small number of records such as configuration tables and no aggregations. Although column storage was commonly used as the default table type for many SAP applications and also have been modified from row to column over time for further optimization as explained in SAP note 1850112 – Changes to technical properties row/column store and 2151363 – Change of storage type to column store
Prior to SAP HANA 2.0 SPS03, SQL DDL statement for CREATE TABLE had defaulted to row store when table type was not explicitly declared and caused confusion. When tables are created as row types and used as Analytic workload, it had noticeable performance degradation compared to column store.
To remove this confusion and also benefit from the setting default type, the table type have now changed from row store to column store from SAP HANA 2.0 SPS03. Now, the table will not be mistakenly created as row store which had severe impact.
This change of default table type mentioned in the release note #2551355 for SAP HANA 2.0 SPS03 with the following description indicating that without explicitly declaring a table type either as ROW or COLUMN, the default will be COLUMN from SPS03 onwards.
Default Table Type
The default table type has been changed in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 to column-type tables. If the table type in an SQL CREATE TABLE statement is not explicitly stated then the table will automatically be created as a column table. The default table type for temporary tables remains unchanged as row-type.
I hope this will remove any confusion going forward
Tae Suk Son
SAP HANA Product Management