Thanks for that, I'll check them out.

From my work there are 2 key advantages that using a column oriented approach bring:

1. There is far less storage required to represent data in a column oriented database due to the ability to compress like data. This storage benefit is really important when you get to tables, as it means you can hold more of your data set in memory at any one time.

2. For tables that have a lot of columns, but queries that only touch a few at a time, it means less work for the query to do, since there is no jumping from row pointed to column pointer.

Cheers