• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.29-38
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• 2011

Unlike in traditional row-oriented database systems, a column-oriented database system stores data in column-oriented and not row-oriented order. Recently, research results revealed the effectiveness of column-oriented databases for applications such as data warehouse and decision support systems that access large volumes of data in a read only manner. In this paper, we investigate the join strategies for column-oriented databases and prove the effectiveness of column-oriented databases in data warehouse systems. For unbiased comparison, the two database systems are analyzed using the star schema benchmark and the performance analysis of a star schema join query is carried out. We experimented with well-known join algorithms and considered early materialization and late materialization join strategies for column-oriented databases. The performance results confirm that star schema join queries perform better in terms of disk I/O cost in column-oriented databases than in row-oriented databases. In addition, the late materialization strategy showed more performance gain than the early materialization strategy in column-oriented databases.