Column oriented storage

While a relational database is optimized for storing rows of data, typically for transactional applications, a columnar database is optimized for fast retrieval of columns of data, typically in analytical applications. Column-oriented storage for database tables is an important factor in analytic query performance because it drastically reduces the overall disk I/O requirements and reduces the amount of data you need to load from disk.

• https://aws.amazon.com/nosql/columnar/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_best-practices-sort-key.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/t_Creating_tables.html