Definition of "columnar" [co•lum•nar]

• Having the shape of a column. (adjective)
• Constructed with or having columns. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Longer term, Schlegel said performance could also be boosted using an emerging architecture known as a columnar databases, which optimise the database to extract a few columns of data extremely quickly, rather than rows of data."
• "Some users of these "columnar" databases rave about them."
• "The masses are often evenly and longitudinally striated by a kind of columnar structure, exhibiting a fascicle of small prisms; and some of these prisms ending sooner than others, give a broken termination of great beauty, similar to our form of the emblem of 'the order of the star.'"