Re: stonebraker diffs RDBMS

Robert Bernier wrote:

>Two links here, comments anybody?
>
>http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/databases/news/index.cfm?newsid=5059
>
>http://www.databasecolumn.com/
>
>Robert
>
>
>

OK, I'm being stupid here- can someone please explain to me the
difference between a column-oriented database and a fully normalized
row-oriented database?  Most databases are insufficiently normalized,
this I know (including mine).  And this causes pain.  But it seems to me
that full normalized (aka column-oriented) databases also cause pain,
just a different type of pain.  Collecting rows I'm very likely to all
want together onto the same page strikes me as being a signifigant
performance advantage.  Having to read in a page for every column- or
worse yet, O(log N) pages for each column (as I have to traverse an
index)- strikes me as being a huge performance hit.

But maybe I'm not seeing something, and someone can enlighten me.

Brian