DevOps Articles

What Is a Column Database and When Should You Use One?

There are a lot of different options when it comes to choosing a database for your application. A common discussion seems to be the high-level SQL vs. NoSQL database argument of whether data should be stored in a relational database or in a NoSQL alternative like https://www.influxdata.com/key-value-database/?utm_source=vendor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2022-12_spnsr-ctn_column-database_tns, https://www.influxdata.com/document-database/?utm_source=vendor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2022-12_spnsr-ctn_column-database_tns or https://www.influxdata.com/graph-database/?utm_source=vendor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2022-12_spnsr-ctn_column-database_tns databases.

As the name suggests, a column (or columnar) database stores data organized into columns instead of rows on disk.

There are several factors at play that result in column databases being able to provide orders of magnitude better performance for https://www.influxdata.com/glossary/olap/?utm_source=vendor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2022-12_spnsr-ctn_column-database_tns) workloads, compared to traditional databases.

Application Performance Monitoring https://www.influxdata.com/solutions/application-performance-monitoring-apm/?utm_source=vendor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2022-12_spnsr-ctn_column-database_tns is another common situation to use column databases to help improve software reliability and performance.