Row vs Columnar Databases

Row Store Databases

● Store/organize data by row

● All the columns within a row are written/stored
together in the disk
● Mainly used for OLTP (Online transactional
processing )
● A single column/field cannot be accessed without
accessing the entire row
 Row vs Columnar Databases
Columnar Databases

● Store/organize data by each field/column

● All the data within a field are written/stored
together in the disk
● Mainly used for OLAP (Online Analytical
processing )
● A single column/field can be accessed without
accessing the entire row
 Row vs Columnar Databases
Employee_id Designation Department City

1 Software IT Bombay
Engineer

2 Sales Executive Marketing Boston

3 Data Engineer BI Toronto

OLTP (Mysql,Postgresql,Oracle,Sql-Server) - “Select * from emp_details” will read the entire

row and “select Employee_id from emp_details” will also read the entire row .

OLAP (Snowflake,Bigquery,Redshift,Hive) - “Select * from emp_details” will read the entire

row and “select Employee_id from emp_details” will only read the selected column .