MonetDB

MonetDB is an open source column-oriented database management system developed at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI; Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica) in the Netherlands. It was designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, e.g. combining tables with hundreds of columns and multi-million rows. As such, MonetDB can be used in application areas that because of performance issues are no-go areas for using traditional database technology in a real-time manner. MonetDB has been successfully applied in high-performance applications for data mining, OLAP, GIS, XML Query, text and multimedia retrieval. MonetDB internal data representation is memory-based, relying on the huge memory addressing ranges of contemporary CPUs using demand paging, and thus departing from traditional DBMS designs involving complex management of large data stores in limited memory. MonetDB introduced innovations at all layers of a DBMS (see the MonetDB publications): a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, a modern CPU-tuned vectorized query execution architecture that often gives MonetDB a more than 10-fold raw speed advantage on the same algorithm over a typical interpreter-based RDBMS. MonetDB is one of the first database systems to focus its query optimization effort on exploiting CPU caches. MonetDB also features automatic and self-tuning indexes, run-time query optimization, a modular software architecture, etc. [1] [2] The MonetDB family consists of: MonetDB/SQL: the relational database solution MonetDB/XQuery: the XML database solution MonetDB Server: the multi-model database server