Column-stores are a big part of the technology described in Google's Dremel paper (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html http://research.google.com/pubs

Column-stores are a big part of the technology described in Google's Dremel paper (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html); they used a column-oriented format to build a system to support interactive queries to big datasets.