 Unlike most other database systems which store rows of a database table in one place (row-oriented architecture) Metakit stores individual columns separately (column-oriented architecture).For many years only linear access to the tables was possible (with complexity O(1) for access and O(N) for search), later hash structures and B-tree like structures were added (reducing typical search complexity to O(1)).Relational operations (like "group-by" and joins) were also added over years.