What Is a Columnar Database?

Key columnar database advantages are:

Traditional row-oriented

A columnar database is a preferred choice for analytical applications because it allows to have many columns in a table just in case, but don’t pay the cost for unused columns on read query execution time. Column-oriented databases are designed for big data processing because and data warehousing, they often natively scale using distributed clusters of low-cost hardware to increase throughput. ClickHouse does it with combination of distributed and tables.