Infobright Blog

According to Chris Dunne, VP of Market Development for ChoicePoint Precision Marketing, part of LexisNexis, “Improved marketing efficiency, increased intelligence and lower overall costs are all possible with a columnar database structure. Database marketers should investigate the advantages this new approach could bring to their own marketing systems”

As the adoption and use of columnar databases grow in the world of marketing, companies like LexisNexis Choicepoint and others will likely experience significant costs savings as Chris further points out by stating “Another benefit of using columnar database solutions is the lower cost of ownership”. Chris attributes this to columnar requiring “less throughput capacity than their traditional full-table file counterparts, hardware requirements are reduced. Expensive large-scale disks can be replaced with lower-cost alternatives while still improving performance.”

The types of critical information needed by marketing range from understanding and discovering customer usage patterns, customer churn, campaign management, website navigation and customer interactions.  All of these sources of information likely land in a data warehouse. The ideal data warehouse for marketing initiatives would be a columnar database because of the nature of the complex queries that marketing professionals need to answer rapidly on a day to day basis. Any other solution would likely increase costs, create lag and friction in getting results to the marketing team and be less likely to see significant returns on investments, especially when open source columnar databases are available at much lower costs than their commercial counterparts.  

In fact, Chris points out that “advantage of columnar database is its ability to easily integrate into an existing marketing system simply by feeding data from a data warehouse or from outside sources”. 

Chris clearly understands the benefits of columnar database and to gain more of insight, I would encourage you to read an article he published in DMNews found here