Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Wide Column Stores

Wide column stores are often referred to as big table stores, after one of the best-known examples, Google’s BigTable. Typically, a relational database reads data from tables using rows. Data is then sorted to find only those contents of a row that are needed. Wide column stores change the system by reading data from tables in columns, selecting the attributes first before reading in data. This is more efficient for input and output read-only queries. This means that wide column stores tend to be very efficient for databases that are mostly used for reading stored data, especially from very large data sets.

Wide column stores use something like tables, with a defined schema for each table. Unlike relational databases, wide ...