AI engineering glossary · Data engineering
What is row-oriented storage?
Row-oriented storage: Laying out a table so all fields of one record are stored together. It makes reading or writing a whole record fast, which suits transaction systems, but it reads unneeded columns during large analytical scans.
Row-oriented storage: an example
An order-processing database fetches all details of order 1234 in one read because its fields sit together on disk.
Related terms
More Data engineering terms
- Schema evolution
- Schema on read
- Schema on write
- Sensor
- Shuffle
- Slowly changing dimension
- Small files problem
- Snowflake
Where you learn it
Row-oriented storage is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.