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Columnar storage

Columnar storage stores data by column rather than by row, which makes analytical queries much faster.

Written by Reflective Data experts · updated Oct 5, 2026

A query that sums one column only needs to read that column, not every field of every row. Columns of similar values also compress very well.

BigQuery, Snowflake and Redshift all use columnar storage.

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Data warehouseOLAPPartitioning and clustering

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