A distributed database system can implement a column-based database system and a row-based database system for processing data. The row-based database system can store data organized into key value pairs, and data to be processed by the row-based database system is converted to a key-value format compressing keys that correspond to values. The distributed database system can perform serialization and compression in converting the data to the key-value format for efficient data storage performance. The distributed database system can unpack portions of the converted serialized compressed data in response to queries that process a portion of serialized compressed data without unpacking the entire converted dataset.