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I can't think of any columnar DBs that are FOSS aside from Cloudera's Impala (under the Apache licence), and IMO while it represents as a DB, it's a sometimes leaky abstraction over the Hadoop ecosystem, and its used columnar format, Parquet, has some data-type limitations compared to other products.

But I agree - we've had some "fun" with our columnar DB's vendor, and the support we're paying so much for has been rather useless.



Impala is cool but it's a data warehouse, not a full-featured DBMS. The biggest difference is that it only supports batch inserts, so forget about UPDATE/DELETE queries.

In any case, CitusDB's home page doesn't say anything about it being a columnar database, and this blog post says it uses the same storage engine as PostgreSQL.


> Impala is cool but it's a data warehouse, not a full-featured DBMS.

I wouldn't even call it that to be honest, you spend a lot of time thinking about Hadoop and HDFS files when working with Impala.

> In any case, CitusDB's home page doesn't say anything about it being a columnar database

It does, if you dig deep enough. :) https://www.citusdata.com/citus-products/cstore-fdw

But you're right that it's completely optional and not needed to access their distributed query processing.


> I can't think of any columnar DBs that are FOSS aside from Cloudera's Impala

Cassandra isn't strictly a columnar store, but it has much the same properties.

MonetDB.

(O)RCFile.

InfiniDB (which actually did go out of business, and is still available as open source).

Druid.

I'm sure I missed a bunch of others.


Monetdb (although not distributed).




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