F1 does not itself have a storage engine, and can use a variety of them. Spanner is actually now columnar [1] in a way that's similar to Parquet: > Ressi store

F1 does not itself have a storage engine, and can use a variety of them. Spanner is actually now columnar [1] in a way that's similar to Parquet: > Ressi stores a database as an LSM tree, whose layers are periodically compacted. Within each layer, Ressi organizes data into blocks in row-major order, but lays out the data within a block in column-major order (essentially, the PAX layout). [1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/46103.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...