--- title: "What Is Columnar Storage and Why Does It Make Analytics Faster?" url: https://daily.dev/posts/what-is-columnar-storage-and-why-does-it-make-analytics-faster--8rsddrzrh source_url: https://cratedb.com/blog/columnar-database-analytics type: article source: "CrateDB" published: 2026-06-22T09:40:34.919Z updated: 2026-06-22T09:40:58.404Z tags: ["backend", "olap", "cratedb"] reading_time: 10 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # What Is Columnar Storage and Why Does It Make Analytics Faster? **[CrateDB](https://daily.dev/sources/cratedb)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Columnar databases store each column separately on disk, so analytical queries that access only a few columns out of many skip the rest entirely — reducing I/O by up to 95% on wide tables. This also enables better compression since similar data types are stored contiguously. The traditional trade-off between write-optimized row storage and read-optimized columnar storage historically forced teams to run two separate systems with ETL pipelines between them. CrateDB's hybrid architecture writes incoming data simultaneously to both row-based and columnar stores on the same table, letting the query planner automatically choose the optimal access path: columnar for aggregations, row-oriented for point lookups. This eliminates the need for pre-aggregation, separate data warehouses, or batch ETL steps while supporting sub-second latency on billions of rows. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [What Is a Columnar Database? Understanding the Power Behind Real-Time Analytics](https://daily.dev/posts/what-is-a-columnar-database-understanding-the-power-behind-real-time-analytics-ddxxul0dj) · CrateDB · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Inside CrateDB: How Storage Optimization Powers Real-Time Analytics at Scale](https://daily.dev/posts/inside-cratedb-how-storage-optimization-powers-real-time-analytics-at-scale-3iozebt7s) · CrateDB · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Columnar Storage is Normalization](https://daily.dev/posts/columnar-storage-is-normalization-d4ixs7py3) · Hacker News · 5 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#backend](https://daily.dev/tags/backend), [#olap](https://daily.dev/tags/olap), [#cratedb](https://daily.dev/tags/cratedb) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/what-is-columnar-storage-and-why-does-it-make-analytics-faster--8rsddrzrh)