C-Store: A column-oriented DBMS prototype

Note: Do not use this repository as an actual DBMS. It is a mostly-unmaintained research prototype.

C-Store was a prototype for a columnar, analytics-focused (read-focused) DBMS, developed in the mid-2000's. Read more about it on the project's (frozen/archived) homepage. It involed researchers such a Daniel Abadi, Samuel Madden, Miguel Ferreira and others (not including the owner/maintainer of this repository!); and resulted in several academic publications.

C-Store's development as a free-software project/repository ended in 2006, with the last release (so to speak) made in October 2006: C-Store 0.2. Development did continue as a commercial product, Vertica, currently owned by Micro Focus (after its merger with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Solutions in 2017) - but of course, one cannot study Vertica's closed codebase.

The final FOSS release of C-Store is available for free download on the project website, butunfortunately - it suffers from multiple issues:

• Incompatible with (newer versions of) modern compilers (even GCC, which it targeted) - they fail compiling it.
• Incompatible with the C++ standard library, especially with respect to file locations.
• Incompatible with newer versions of supporting libraries (e.g. Berkeley DB, LZO compression) and/or their location in modern Linux distributions.
• Uses manually-written Makefile's instead of generating them.
• Does not try to detect location of relevant software on the system.
• Has a lot of questionable-though-compilable code: Ambiguity, unsafe type conversion and so on.

These issues motivated the creation of this repository. The intent is to address - fix or circumvent - the above issues, with minimal changes, and without altering C-Store functionality. Another possible goal is to expand somewhat the range of systems on which CMake would build and run. There is no intention of further optimizing the code or introducing any new functionality.

Contact and feedback

Note: The owner/maintainer of this repository is not one of the authors or researchers involved with C-Store originally!

• Have you found a bug in the code? Report it via the issues page.
• Do you have questions about C-Store as a project, its design, or even implementation specifics? Ask one of the original authors. However, the repository owner/maintainer is involved in column store architecture research, and may be interested in discussing your idea in other contexts.
• Are you having trouble building C-Store on
  • ... GNU/Linux? Report it via the issues page.
  • ... any other platform? Not surprising - C-Store was only intended to build on Linux. However, you may write the repository maintainer to try and explain why you want to make this work on other platforms.
• Do you have a specific idea about how to improve C-Store's design or implementation?
  1. Don't bother... the code is essentially frozen, and is maintained as a resource for researchers into column stores.
  2. Do bother! ... but not in C-Store itself: Contact the repository maintainer to chat about column store architecture and potential collaborations.