Do you understand the differences and applications of "row stores" versus "column stores"? If SQL databases are optimized for the retrieval of entire rows or records, column stores are optimized for the storage and analysis of entire columns in a database (similar data types allows for greater compression and bringing much more data into memory.)
I don't know if anyone has implemented a database optimized for array processing, but the benefit for predictive modeling should be obvious. I'm sure optimization for GPU processing wouldn't hurt either.
I'm wondering the same thing. I'm just not seeing how a table is different from a 2D array. I assume that I'm getting stuck in the conventional programming language definition of "array", and there's some finer point as applied to database theory.
I'm not sure how this answers the question. Personally, I'm reasonably conversant with the ideas of relational algebra, and quite good with relational databases.
But the article at the link you suggest doesn't even contain the word "array", so I'm still no closer to understanding how this concept differs from traditional tables.
