Does columnar storage require special hardware or complex setup?
No. DuckDB, a modern in-process columnar engine, runs on laptops and requires zero setup. Parquet is a file format—any query engine (Spark, Presto, DuckDB, Polars) that reads it gets the benefits. The trade-off is simpler: Parquet is immutable and optimized for batch loads, not live writes. DuckDB supports updates but compiles to more efficient code for immutable data.
Answered in
Columnar Storage: Why Column Stores Beat Row Stores for AnalyticsColumnar storage reads only needed columns, skipping the rest. Dictionary encoding shrinks data 50–100×. Analytics queries go from minutes to milliseconds.
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More system design questions
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