Yes, the downside being that if you need all the columns of one specific record (row), it will be spread over many column blocks. As a rule of the thumb, if mo

Yes, the downside being that if you need all the columns of one specific record (row), it will be spread over many column blocks. As a rule of the thumb, if most of your queries are aggregations over few columns of many records (OLAP), column based would be a better choice - whereas if you need to access every column/field of a small number of records (OLTP), record/row based would be a better choice.