Row and column storage in SAP HANA

Relational databases typically use row-based data storage. SAP HANA uses both (row based and column based data storage)

• The row storage: This stores records in a sequence of rows

• The column storage: The column entries are stored in a continuous memory location

Before getting into a SAP HANA specific discussion, let's try to understand how different column storage is from row. The column-oriented database systems (in our case, SAP HANA) perform better than traditional row-oriented database systems on analytical tasks, in areas such as data warehouses, decision support, predictive analysis, and business intelligence applications.

The major reason behind this performance difference in these areas is that column stores are more I/O efficient for read-only queries as they only have to read the attributes accessed by a query from the disk or memory.

Let's see a few factors that optimize performance in the column storage:

• Compression: The data stored in columns is...