Ask YC: column-oriented databases and BigTable clones
AppEngine has renewed interest in Google's BigTable. Has anyone used Hadoop's Hbase? Or Hypertable? What is your opinion of the usefulness/applicability of column-oriented databases (distributed or otherwise) in web applications? Do you use or recommend this approach?
Column stores generally compress the data better than row stores. Some xml systems like XMill[1] use column representations behind the scenes for this reason.
column-oriented databases are great for huge amounts of information which will primarily require reading and updating, with not much inserting at all. if this is relevant to your web app, then i would recommend this approach. if not, then you don't really need it, and you'd be fine with a regular row-oriented database.