Entry Date:
October 7, 2008

C-Store: A Column-Oriented DBMS

Principal Investigator Samuel Madden

Co-investigator Michael Stonebraker


C-Store is a read-optimized relational DBMS that contrasts sharply with most current systems, which are write-optimized. Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding and packing of objects into storage including main memory during query processing, storing an overlapping collection of column-oriented projections, rather than the current fare of tables and indexes, a non-traditional implementation of transactions which includes high availability and snapshot isolation for read-only transactions, and the extensive use of bitmap indexes to complement B-tree structures.

The CStore project is a collaboration between MIT, Yale, Brandeis University. Brown University, and UMass Boston.