>It is not difficult to simulate column store in a row store system if
>you're willing to decompose your tables into (what is essentially)>BCNF fragments. It simply is laborious for designers and programmers.
I could see a true column store having much better performance than tricking a row based system into it. Just think of the per-row overhead we currently have at 28 bytes per row. Breaking up data manually like that may help a little, but if you don't have a very wide table to begin with, it could turn out you save next to nothing by doing so. A column store wouldn't have this issue, and could potentially have much better performance.