This is interesting to me. What is the indexing strategy that is utilized? To me the challenge is that the values making up a row are stored non-contiguously.

This is interesting to me. What is the indexing strategy that is utilized? To me the challenge is that the values making up a row are stored non-contiguously. The best case scenario is that a row of N fields requires N data accesses. This is assuming that you can index directly into an array or similar structure with constant access time. Row-based storage means that you get all fields for "free"when accessing a single row, since the DB engine accesses a page at a time. This is my understanding of the problem - I am very interested to learn what I'm missing if you have any good articles to share.