OLTP and NoSQL databases are useful for application deployment but have limited capabilities for large-scale analysis. A query for a large volume of structured data for analytics purposes is better served by a data warehouse platform designed for faster access to structured data. Modern data warehouse technologies adopt the columnar format and use massive parallel processing (MPP), which helps to fetch and analyze data faster.

The columnar format avoids the need to scan the entire table when you need to aggregate only one column for data—for example, if you want to determine the sales of your inventory in a given month. There may be hundreds of columns in the order table, but you need to aggregate data from the purchase column only. With a columnar format, you will only scan the purchase column, which reduces the amount of data scanned compared to the row format, and thereby increases the query performance.

With massive parallel processing, you...