MonetDB

MonetDB is an open-source column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS) originally developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It is designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, such as combining tables with hundreds of columns and millions of rows. MonetDB has been applied in high-performance applications for online analytical processing, data mining, geographic information system (GIS), Resource Description Framework (RDF), text retrieval and sequence alignment processing. Data mining projects in the 1990s required improved analytical database support. This resulted in a CWI spin-off called Data Distilleries, which used early MonetDB implementations in its analytical suite. Data Distilleries eventually became a subsidiary of SPSS in 2003, which in turn was acquired by IBM in 2009. MonetDB in its current form was first created in 2002 by doctoral student Peter Boncz and professor Martin L. Kersten as part of the 1990s' MAGNUM research project at University of Amsterdam. It was initially called simply Monet, after the French impressionist painter Claude Monet. The first version under an open-source software license (a modified version of the Mozilla Public License) was released on September 30, 2004. When MonetDB version 4 was released into the open-source domain, many extensions to the code base were added by the MonetDB/CWI team, including a new SQL front end, supporting the SQL:2003 standard. MonetDB introduced innovations in all layers of the DBMS: a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, a modern CPU-tuned query execution architecture that often gave MonetDB a speed advantage over the same algorithm over a typical interpreter-based RDBMS. It was one of the first database systems to tune query optimization for CPU caches. MonetDB includes automatic and self-tuning indexes, run-time query optimization, and a modular software architecture. By 2008, a follow-on project called X100 (MonetDB/X100) started, which evolved into the VectorWise technology.