6.830: Lecture 15 (11/05/09)

Read:

• Michael Stonebraker, Daniel Abadi, Adam Batkin, Xuedong Chen, Mitch Cherniack, Miguel Ferreira, Edmond Lau, Amerson Lin, Samuel Madden, Elizabeth O'Neil, Pat O'Neil, Alex Rasin, Nga Tran, Stan Zdonik. C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS. In Proceedings of VLDB, 2005. [PDF]

This paper discusses the C-Store system, which is a read-optimized database system with a novel physical arrangement of data on disk, as well as an unusual approach to recovery and query processing

As you read the papers, consider the following questions:

1. Why does the C-Store idea of arranging data as columns improve query performance?
2. How does C-Store propose to do recovery? Is there an advantage to this approach?
3. How does C-Store isolate transactions? Do you think this is a good idea?