In recent years, column stores (or C-stores for short) have emerged as a
novel approach to deal with read-mostly data warehousing applications.
Experimental evidence suggests that, for certain types of queries, the new
features of C-stores result in orders of magnitude improvement over traditional
relational engines. At the same time, some C-store proponents argue that
C-stores are fundamentally different from traditional engines, and therefore
their benefits cannot be incorporated into a relational engine short of a
complete rewrite. In this paper we challenge this claim and show that many of
the benefits of C-stores can indeed be simulated in traditional engines with no
changes whatsoever. We then identify some limitations of our ?pure-simulation?
approach for the case of more complex queries. Finally, we predict that
traditional relational engines will eventually leverage most of the benefits of
C-stores natively, as is currently happening in other domains such as XML data.