The internals are completely different. Given the collection of software technologies we posses today, you can't assemble them around a database using a row-ori

The internals are completely different. Given the collection of software technologies we posses today, you can't assemble them around a database using a row-oriented encoding and come up with something that can outperform (in space, time and cost) the kinds of query styles that column-oriented encodings absolutely murder. Logically they're the same thing, but engineering is about details, details in this case that could easily be a 2x to 20x budget difference given an appropriate project A column store can take 100 years worth of samples occurring every 10ms that yield a constant result and using technology we actually have, represent those ~87 million data points on disk and in CPU using somewhere under 10 bytes.