> For a long time I was confused about why HBase was described as a columnar data store when access was still pretty row-based The term was overloaded by colum

> For a long time I was confused about why HBase was described as a columnar data store when access was still pretty row-based The term was overloaded by column-family stores, which were often referred to as just 'column stores', probably by people who were not aware of systems like Vertica and MonetDB. http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/distinguishing-two-major-types-of_29.html http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/distinguishing-two...