Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets

Dremel is a strong systems pick for understanding columnar analytics, nested data, and query serving at scale. It connects directly to Fanout's storage and analytics material without becoming a database-product tour.

Reading focus: Why columnar layout can reduce bytes read for analytical queries. How nested records can be represented with repetition and definition levels. Why interactive analytics needs a different serving shape than OLTP.

VLDB 2010. Melnik et al.. 45 min read, medium difficulty.