As pointed out by another commenter, Cassandra is not a column store. Its storage format is quite inefficient for compression and for large scans of subsets of columns, which is what columnar stores are designed for (Cassandra and HBase optimize for different use cases, which are much closer to OLTP).

You can find a brief description of why and when you want actual columnar formats in the introduction section of this blog post: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/dremel-made-simple-with-parque... .

You can read more about columnar databases here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS

A columnar storage format for a database engine that does not have operations specifically tuned for vectorization and taking advantage of data being cheaply available a column chunk at a time instead of a row chunk at a time is only half the battle -- you can get massive perf wins on top of the work CitusDB did by doing things like operating on compressed data / delaying decompression, avoiding deserialization for column values based on a filtering scan of another column, pipelining operations on column values to fit better into your cpu architecture, etc.

But just having the IO wins is nice, too.