And in addition, each column, or even partition of a column, can store statistics about itself like min max avg count etc. That way if you look up max(column) y

And in addition, each column, or even partition of a column, can store statistics about itself like min max avg count etc. That way if you look up max(column) you only have to read the meta data on the partitions on that column, it's very fast. And for analytics this is pretty common.