[tzs]

This sounds similar to relational databases vs document oriented databases, at least when I briefly looked into database like MongoDB when such things were all the rage 15-20 years ago.

For the internal web site that customer support people used a document oriented database would be great because that wants to load everything about one customer and pretty much doesn't need anything else until the user is done supporting that customer.

For the dozens or periodic reports that needed to be generated relational was way better. A given report generally only wanted a small amount of per customer data but wanted that for all customers.

A little bit of searching and LLM querying suggests that nowadays there are databases that are good at both kind of tasks, in particular Postgress with JSONB, at least at the scale we were looking at (maybe 30k or so customers), but maybe really big operations would need more specialized software.

[tremon]

The Array-of-Struct vs Struct-vs-Array organization is actually more similar to row-major ordering vs column-major ordering, i.e. the data structure that analysis databases use to optimize for aggregate calculations. Document databases are not really comparable because they don't impose structure on the data; with document databases you just have a tree of JSON elements, which is neither AoS nor SoA.

[ncruces]

Or, another name for the same thing columnar: storage vs. row storage.