The following is a list of resources that may help you to understand some of the architectural features of Apache Kudu and columnar data storage. The links further down tend toward the academic and are not required reading in order to understand how to install, use, and administer Kudu.

Kudu Project

Read the official Kudu documentation and learn how you can get involved.

Kudu Documentation

Read the official Kudu documentation, which includes more in-depth information about installation and configuration choices.

Kudu Github Repository

Examine the Kudu source code and contribute to the project.

Kudu-Examples Github Repository

View and run several Kudu code examples, as well as the Kudu Quickstart VM.

Kudu White Paper

Read draft of the white paper discussing Kudu's architecture, written by the Kudu development team.

In Search Of An Understandable Consensus Algorithm, Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout, Stanford University. 2014.

The original whitepaper describing the Raft consensus algorithm.

Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really? Abadi, Madden, Hachem. 2008.

A discussion of the characteristics of column-based and row-based datastores and their characteristics under different workloads and schemas.