| Row Store | Column Store |
| As the name suggest it will stores table records in a sequence of rows | And on the other place here entries of a column stored in contiguous memory locations. |
| The application needs to process only one single record at one time (many selects and /or updates of single records). | Calculations are typically executed on individual or a small number of columns. |
| The application typically needs to access the complete record. | The table is searched based on the values of a few columns. |
| The columns contain mainly distinct values so compression rate would be low. | The table has a large number of columns. |
| Neither aggregations nor fast searching are required. | The table has a large number of rows and columnar operations are required (aggregate, scan, and so on) |
| The table has a small number of rows (for example, configuration tables). | High compression rates can be achieved because the majority of the columns contain only a few distinct values (compared to the number of rows). |