Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by nwatson | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

nwatson

Sensage/Addamark was too early to the columnar storage game in 2001-2003 ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensage.

View on HN

Sybase/IQ (now SAP IQ, originally acquired from Expressway) was launched in 1995.

There are other old column databases, such as kdb, but I believe Sybase/Expessway was the first commercial product.

I think the claim here is that Citus added it to PostgreSQL.

Depending on how one defines that claim, Greenplum may have been first.

Disclosure: I work for VMware, which sponsors Greenplum development.

Definitely not intending to take credit away from any other teams. There are so many good Postgres extensions and forks in this ecosystem.

What we've done is add a Columnar storage feature into the Citus open source extension to Postgres, as part of Citus 10.

One way to think of it: Citus 10 now gives Postgres users (those who are also using the Citus extension) a columnar compression option, for use on a single node and/or a distributed Citus cluster.

Thanks. Regardless of who did what, columnar stores are non-trivial engineering and anyone who produces a production-ready one is worthy of admiration.

Greenplum was founded in 2003, A/S was 2001.

Again, my qualifier is "to PostgreSQL". I couldn't see such a connection on a brief skim of the A/S wikipedia entry.

I was the PM for the software side of Greenplum DB for a while. I also don't know of an earlier example of a separate column oriented storage option on top of a Postgres base. Vertica and ParAccel (which became Redshift) both also started from a Postgres base (though Vertica claims otherwise in marketing material) but were a little later. In any case, "Column oriented storage for Postgres" is almost 20 years old. This also isn't the first open source implementation.

Nice to meet you :-)

You're right that Addamark wasn't open source and wasn't a storage option, but it was indeed built with a Postgres base.

Here's the paper (2002):

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa2002/tech/full_pape...

There were non-Postgres SQL columnar stores as well, most notably Sybase IQ, which dates to the 1990s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_IQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com