Relational database systems have traditionally optimized for I/0 performance and organized records sequentially on disk pages using the N-ary Storage Model (NSM) (a.k.a., slotted pages).

Recently, a number of papers have been published showing the benefits of column stores over row stores. However, the research comparing the two in an “apples-to-apples ” way has left a number of unresolved questions. In this paper, we first discuss the factors that can affect the relative performance of each paradigm. Then, we choose points within each of the factors to study further. Our study examines five tables with various characteristics and different query workloads in order to obtain a greater understanding and quantification of the relative performance of column stores and row stores. We then add materialized views to the analysis and see how much they can help the performance of row stores. Finally, we examine the performance of hash join operations in column stores and row stores. 1.

Predator is a freely available database system. This paper studies the performance of the Predator query execution engine using high-level and low-level profiling. We describe the aspects of running database systems on modern processors and the tools available for investigating how these aspects influence performance. We follow the methodology of previous work in database systems pro ling. Our results confirm previous findings and we investigate further into the causes of these findings by looking at how various parameters of variation affect performance of query execution.