Does MonetDB support thousands of sparse columns efficiently?

Question

Does MonetDB support thousands of sparse columns efficiently? E.g.: empty fields don't incur overhead, not a lot per-column overhead, etc.

Answer 1

If you attempt to store it as a relational table of thousands of columns, you won't save storage space. Which only consumes diskspace. An alternative approach is to store it as a collection of thousands of (key,value) tables. Whatever the choice, you better rely on generated queries.

Strings values are dictionary compressed.