In the direction or manner of columns; moving or arranged vertically rather than horizontally.
From column + -wise (adverb suffix meaning 'in the manner or direction of'). The -wise suffix comes from Old English and is used to indicate direction, manner, or position.
In data science, choosing to process columnwise versus rowwise can make a calculation millions of times faster—modern computers are optimized to access column data in memory, which is why columnwise operations became a design principle in tools like Apache Arrow. A single design choice made everything faster.
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