Kognitio - row vs column?

I was reading an interesting article by Stephen Swoyer at TDWI where he interviewed the US CEO of Kognitio - John Thompson.  Interesting article that you can read at: http://tdwi.org/Articles/2010/04/21/Kognitio-Row-Based-Databases.aspx.  This continues the arguments of row vs column for analytical databases.  I just got back from the Oracle Collaborate conference and also heard some of the same discussion there.  Oracle now has hybrid columnar compression for their database in version 11g.  One very interesting thing I noted in Stephen's TDWI article is that for Big Data, Kognitio can "do real-time continuous loading into the database".  According to John Thomson, this is "a make-or-break feature" because they have "seen the complete collapse of the batch window".  This is very interesting.  There is no longer a batch window to load huge amounts of data so doing this continuous loading of big data into the database while still being able to perform analytics does sound like a very good feature.