A columnstore database takes all the values in a given column – the zip code column in a customer database, for instance – and stores all the zip code values in a single row, with the column number as the first entry. So the start of a columnstore database’s ZIP code record might look like this: 5, 94063, 20474, 38654… The “5” at the beginning means that the ZIP code data is stored in the fifth column in the rowstore database of customer names and addresses that the original data