Google announced today that it is open sourcing a query engine library called Supersonic, which the company says is “extremely useful for creating a column oriented database back-end.”

“Supersonic’s main strength lies in its speed,” says Google’s Supersonic Team in a post to Google’s Open Source blog. “It is a cache-aware engine which exploits several low-level optimization techniques to ensure second-to-none execution times and high throughput. By making use of SIMD instructions and efficient pipelining we make columnar data processing very fast.”

“The engine supports a wide variety of typical columnar operations as well as many other specialized functionalities,” the team adds. “We believe it be a useful tool for those of you working on new DBMS solutions to help handle your data more effectively.”

The library is written in C++. More on the project can be found on its Google Code page.