Clustering and Sorting Keys

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References

The Vertica Analytical Database: C-Store 2.0, Michael Stonebraker, Daniel Abadi, Adam Batkin, Xuedong Chen, Mitch Cherniack, Miguel Ferreira, Edmond Lau, Alex Lerner, Stan Letovsky, Pat O'Neil, Spencer Rowland, David S. Smith, Nesime Tatbul, Ron Avnur, Samuel Madden, 2012 Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 5 (VLDB Endowment) DOI: 10.14778/2367502.2367540 - This foundational paper describes the design principles of Vertica, a pioneering commercial columnar database, detailing how data is stored and optimized for analytical queries, including min/max zone maps and physical sorting for block pruning.
Data Skipping with Z-ordering for Delta Lake, Databricks documentation, 2025 (Databricks) - Official documentation explaining Z-ordering as a technique for multidimensional clustering in Delta Lake, demonstrating its effectiveness in block pruning for complex analytical queries across multiple columns.
Database Internals: A Look Inside Today's Storage and Analytical Databases, Alex Petrov, 2019 (O'Reilly Media) - This book provides a comprehensive overview of how modern database systems, including analytical ones, handle data storage, indexing, and query optimization, relevant for understanding the physical design concepts discussed.