Unlike traditional databases, Vertica uses a column-oriented approach for storing data. It stores each column separately on the disk. When you run a query on a Vertica database, only the columns that are called in the query will be accessed. The columns that are not called in the query will be ignored. Therefore, you can process queries very efficiently since the amount of data accessed is much smaller than a traditional row store.

Vertica also uses encoding, sorting, and compression while storing data.