[AlisdairO]

This is the c-store paper, which was evolved into Vertica: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~abadi/vldb.pdf . It's very readable, worth a look.

edit: column stores existed before c-store, but c-store did some very nifty stuff around integrating compression awareness into the query executor

[avinassh]

Thank you, I will read the paper!