What is hybrid-columnar storage?

520 Views Asked by At

Snowflake stores data using a hybrid-columnar storage method. I understand what columnar storage is and its benefits, but what does the hybrid mean? Is this simply referring to Snowflake accessing blob storage from different cloud providers?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

Snowflake uses PAX [Partition Attributes Across] aka hybrid columnar storage meaning:

  • Horizontal and vertical partitioning
  • Automatic column level and partition level compression
  • Natural (built-in) data clustering based on ingestion date (order)

This was part of the SIGMOD 2016 presentation, available here.

A paper on PAX can be found here.