I’ve found databases typically come in two flavors, your traditional row-oriented RDBMS or an object oriented database (OODBMS). However, in the mid 90s I remember, a new breed of databases showing up that were column oriented. Some of these were given the term 4GL, but I don’t think it was a term that stuck.
What I’d like to know is the following:
- What column oriented databases still exist?
- What are the performance characteristics of these databases?
- Are there any open source column oriented databases?
- What platforms do they interoperate with (.NET, Java, etc)
- What’s been your general experience with them?
The two column oriented databases that I remember working with are FAME and KDB.
HBase is an open-source column-oriented database system modelled on Google’s BigTable.