We downloaded the new release a few days ago after Luke mentioned during a call that the new column stuff had been made available.

It’ll be interesting to see how it works once folks start beating on it.

You pretty much predicted everything I was going to say, but nonetheless, my reactions can be found at:

http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2009/10/greenplum-announces-column-oriented.html

- You’d have to agree that every vendor is building from a largely shared pool of ideas. Most of everything that every vendor does is covered in academic literature going back decades. Our goal isn’t being novel in everything we do — it is delivering value to customers.

- That being said, I think a little credit is due here. We’ve built a flexible enough storage infrastructure to allow us to (1) easily add a very efficient implementation of column-oriented tables, and (2) allow both row- and column-orientation to be used not just in the same database but in different partitions of the same table.

So why did we add this feature? It is about customer choice. For most analytical queries and mixed workloads – particularly with high-rate continuous microbatched loads – our row processing wins out over columnar approaches. (i.e. There are good reasons why the pure columnar guys aren’t winning mixed-workload EDW deals against Teradata like we are). But there are a lot of cases where columnar processing does great and does have an edge over row processing. Customers wanted the choice, so now we do both.