Ha ha .. that is what the conference requires. Turns out that there is research that shows that when you are reading paper printed on paper this 2-column format is good for readability and not wasting paper. Conferences still insist on this format even though most people print papers.
Now the good news is that these days, conferences have an accompanying video associated with the paper, and that may be a good place to start for many. That video will be published on the conference website (https://vldb.org/2022/) in about a week.
Great discussion here. As one of the co-authors of the paper, here is some additional information.
If you need both transactions and OLAP in the same system, the prevalent way to deliver high performance on this (HTAP) workload is to make two copies of the data. This is what we did in the SQLite3/HE work (paper: https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2022/papers/p56-prammer.pdf; talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9bQyzm6JRU). That was quite clunky. This two copy approach not only wasted storage but makes the code complicated, and it would be very hard to maintain over time (we did not want to fork the SQLite code -- that is not nice).
So, we approached it in a different way and started to look for how we could get higher performance on OLAP queries working as closely with SQLite's native query processing and storage framework.
There is a lot of room for improvement here, and getting high OLAP and transaction performance in a single-copy database system is IMO a holy grail that many in the community are working on.
BTW - the SQLite team, namely Dr. Hipp (that is a cool name), Lawrence and Dan are amazing to work with. As an academic, I very much enjoyed how deeply academic they are in their thinking. No surprise that they have built an amazing data platform (I call it a data platform as it is much more than a database system, as it has many hooks for extensibility).
