Content Type
Exercise
Duration
20m
Level
Introductory
Discover how to fine-tune your application’s performance in InterSystems IRIS® data platform using traditional row-based or high-efficiency columnar storage, depending on your use case. Columnar storage can significantly accelerate analytical workloads by minimizing unnecessary data scanning, especially when querying large datasets, but row-based storage also has certain benefits.
In this hands-on exercise, you will experience the performance and storage differences firsthand by creating two nearly identical tables with different storage strategies—one row-based and one columnar—and running analytical queries across both.
You will also see how data is physically stored in InterSystems IRIS globals for each type of storage, demonstrating the powerful and flexible storage engine in InterSystems IRIS.
Learning Objectives
- Define row-based and columnar tables in InterSystems IRIS using InterSystems ObjectScript.
- Compare SQL query performance between row-based and columnar tables.
- Examine the underlying global structures to see how data is stored differently in row and column formats.
Prerequisites
- Basic understanding of ObjectScript and globals.