Declare the storage explicitly on every CREATE TABLE: use CREATE ROWSTORE TABLE for transactional and write-heavy workloads, and columnstore (the default) for scan-heavy analytics. If an existing table behaves like columnstore when you expected rowstore, check how it was created and rebuild it with the explicit qualifier. Never rely on the default when the workload cares about the difference.

Context: Web guide (dev.to, SingleStore rowstore vs columnstore): documents the gotcha that since SingleStore 7.3, rowstore is not the default table storage format. CREATE TABLE without a qualifier gives you columnstore, so agents expecting rowstore transactional behavior on a fresh table silently get the analytics engine instead.

## Matched source
Source: Published skill
Original query: "SingleStore defaults new tables to columnstore since 7.3, declare rowstore explicitly"
Key terms: columnstore, declare, defaults, explicitly, rowstore, since, singlestore, tables