The column-store pioneer

The column store technology of MonetDB has found its way into the product offerings of all major commercial database vendors. Its pioneering role has been internationally recognized with the prestigious ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovation  Award and ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. The market for applications empowered by these techniques provides ample space for further innovation, e.g. as demonstrated by our ongoing projects. At the same time, the landscape for major innovations remains wide open. An outlook is given in the award-winning paper titled: The Researcher's Guide to the Data Deluge: Querying a Scientific Database in Just a Few Seconds.

Column-store features
When your database grows into millions of records spread over lots of tables and used in business or science data warehouse applications, you really want a column-store database management system.

MonetDB innovates at all layers of a DBMS, e.g. a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, a modern CPU-tuned query execution architecture, automatic and self-tuning indexes, run-time query optimization, and modular software architecture.
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Download and documentation
The download section contains information to get started with the binary or source download. Once installed, you may want to follow the short tutorials for Linux or Windows or explore the SQL documentation for details about the language and recipes for common tasks in application development.
The nuts and bolts on the database kernel are described in the MonetDB section and the science library. 
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Ongoing development
MonetDB is actively used in our research and real-life applications. Nightly builds and regression testing ensure its quality, bug tracking helps to collect experiences and feature requests. Browsing the source code repository is supported by the Mercurial web frontend. Contributions ranging from bug reports, cross-platform issues,  patches and features are highly appreciated.
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