The development of MonetDB was co-funded by the HBP during the Ramp-up Phase. This page is kept for reference but will no longer be updated.

When a database grows into millions of records spread over many tables and business intelligence or science becomes the prevalent application domain, a column-store database management system (DBMS) is called for. Unlike traditional row-stores, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, a column-store provides a modern and scalable solution without calling for substantial hardware investments.

MonetDB pioneered column-store solutions for high-performance data warehouses for business intelligence and eScience since 1993. It achieves its goal by innovations at all layers of a DBMS, e.g. a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, modern CPU-tuned query execution architecture, automatic and adaptive indices, run-time query optimization, and a modular software architecture. It is based on the SQL 2003 standard with full support of foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures. It is fully ACID compliant and supports a rich spectrum of programming interfaces (JDBC, ODBC, PHP, Python, RoR, C/C++, Perl).

The current version provides the following new features as compared to the version that was part of the HBP-internal Platform Release in M18:

• Python integration
• Representation of arrays inside MonetDB
• MonetDB as a standalone library (MonetDBLite)