“Best Practices in the Use of Columnar Databases: How to select the workloads for columnar databases based on the benefits” provided by William Mcknight. (pdf)
Focuses on Calpont’s InfiniDB.
It is a nice summary of the principles of columnar databases.
Also has amusing observations such as:
MapReduce is a method of parallel reduction of tasks; a 25 year old idea that came out of the Lisp programming language. There are popular implementations of the framework introduced by Google in 2004 to support distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers.
It does make me curious about the use of columnar store databases for particular situations.
Read the whitepaper and see what you think. Comments welcome!