They also tend to have more effective compression. C-store (vertica) is also interesting because it takes advantage of compressed data inside the query engine

They also tend to have more effective compression. C-store (vertica) is also interesting because it takes advantage of compressed data inside the query engine to make queries faster, rather than taking the more traditional step of uncompressing the information and then processing it. One of the main disadvantages (particularly on more naive implementations) is that incremental inserts can be slow, due to the number of disk seeks required to insert a row. I do recommend the c-store paper, it's very well written: http://people.csail.mit.edu/tdanford/6830papers/stonebraker-cstore.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/tdanford/6830papers/stonebraker-...