To succeed today, organizations need to become analytics-focused enterprises. To support that effort, the spectrum of database choices has never been larger, providing an array of options to manage data that continues to grow in volume, variety and velocity.
While the rise of new and bigger data environments may seem complex, the goal centers on the need to make more data useful for decision making more rapidly and for more users. One approach is the columnar database which stores data in column sections rather than rows.
Like the emerging category of in in-memory database technologies, columnar databases are deployed in market segments where speed of data analysis is paramount, such as financial services, retail, healthcare, and telecommunications.
This columnar database approach is often accompanied by other features and capabilities - such as a massively parallel processing architecture, fast data loading capabilities, data compression, and lightning fast query speed - to support high performance in BI, analytics and data warehousing for large datasets.
Here are the winners of the 2014 DBTA Readers' Choice Awards for Best Columnar Database
Winner: HP Vertica
Finalists:
SAP IQ
InfiniDB