Tom Barber

Engineer at Concept to Cloud. Steward of Saiku, the open source OLAP server, at Spicule. Twenty years in the open source data trenches.

Every column store I sold is gone. The format won instead.

Aug 13, 2026

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12 min read

Every column store I sold is gone. The format won instead.

Full Table Scan, issue 2. Twenty years from MySQL to Infobright to Exasol to DuckDB, most of it spent selling engines that no longer exist, and why Parquet is the only thing that actually survived.

Tom Barber, +1

OLAP

Everyone finally agreed on what a metric is

Jul 24, 2026

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13 min read

Everyone finally agreed on what a metric is

Full Table Scan, issue 1. The Open Semantic Interchange, its new home at the Apache Software Foundation, and what happened when I taught Saiku to speak it. The honest version, including the bits we have not finished.

Tom Barber, +1