Comparisons between the merits of row-wise storage (NSM)
and columnar storage (DSM) are typically made with respect
to the persistent storage layer of database systems. In
this paper, however, we focus on the CPU efficiency tradeoffs
of tuple representations inside the query execution engine,
while tuples flow through a processing pipeline. We
analyze the performance in the context of query engines using
so-called "block-oriented" processing --- a recently popularized
technique that can strongly improve the CPU efficiency.
With this high efficiency, the performance trade-offs
between NSM and DSM can have a decisive impact on the
query execution performance, as we demonstrate using both
microbenchmarks and TPC-H query 1. This means that
NSM-based database systems can sometimes benefit from
converting tuples into DSM on-the-fly, and vice versa