Pure marketing bullshit. M/R vs. SQL is a crazy comparison since you use them in two different spots. The paper's authors all have a financial or egotistical stake in Vertica and they fail to mention that any real DW effort is dominated by ETL times (which they admit M/R was better at). Another thing they fail to mention is the exhorbitant price tags associated with the current batch of commercial column-store databases (re: 6 figures and up for Vertica or Aster).