From my perspective, columnar storage is an enormous win. One of the best things I've been able to do for clients on MSSQL has been to tell them simply to creat

From my perspective, columnar storage is an enormous win. One of the best things I've been able to do for clients on MSSQL has been to tell them simply to create a clustered columnstore index on their large tables for analytical workloads. At one point we had a need to perform a diff between a yesterday-snapshot and a today-snapshot of a billion row table. If I recall correctly, this took 1 or 2 minutes with clustered columnstore vs nearly an hour for rowstore. The order of magnitude is certainly correct, even if my specific numbers are wrong. If you're curious why we had to do a full diff between two billion-row tables, that is a story for a different time, but there were good reasons and we also removed those good reasons through other design decisions.