Scaling a star-schemed tables and separate tables to exabyte of data on Vertica?

heison

Vertica's Wikipedia entry markets itself to be able to scale itself to exabyte of data.

Suppose a traditional star-schemed relational database without loops. The db has
separate tables and some tables with common keys. I could combine all tables into
one table by introducing an extra column called "Category" like in the picture.

Now questions:

1. Is this reshaping called "column-oriented"?
2. Does the column-oriented way of thinking infer to make separate tables into one wide table?
3. Does Vertica lie on some other ideas or is this the basic logic behind Vertica (to make straight tables into wide tables and merge everything into one big columnar table)?
4. Is it possible to scale traditional star-schemed tables and separate tables from SQL db to exabyte of data on Vertica?
5. What are common approaches to convert a working relational db into a columnar db of Vertica?
6. What are ways by which Vertica stores its non-zero entries and zero entries? Can I force Vertica to store everything as key-value -pairs or as some sparse data structure? Which sparse data structures does Vertica offer to merge many different tables together that result into many zero/NA entries?