An improved system and method for recovery from failure of a storage server in a distributed column chunk data store is provided. A distributed column chunk data store may be provided by multiple storage servers operably coupled to a network. A storage server provided may include a database engine for partitioning a data table into the column chunks for distributing across multiple storage servers, a storage shared memory for storing the column chunks during processing of semantic operations performed on the column chunks, and a storage services manager for striping column chunks of a partitioned data table across multiple storage servers. Any data table may be flexibly partitioned into column chunks using one or more columns with various partitioning methods. Storage servers may then fail and column chunks may be recreated from parity column chunks and redistributed among the remaining storage servers in the column chunk data store.