A common in-memory columnar data layer would make a lot of sense because a) columnar is generally better for analytics, and b) converting from one columnar form

A common in-memory columnar data layer would make a lot of sense because a) columnar is generally better for analytics, and b) converting from one columnar format to another can theoretically be done without decompression because columnar data is typically compressed using standard algorithms (vocabulary compression, LRE, etc). Here I wrote a few suggestions for such open-source data layer: http://bi-review.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-world-needs-open-source-columnar.html http://bi-review.blogspot.ca/2015/06/the-world-needs-open-so...