It's a columnar database and the query engine is inspired from MonetDB which processes columns in vectors - "Execution engine: The vectorized execution engine is inspired by the paper "MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution" by Peter Boncz, Marcin Zukowski and Niels Nes.".
I wouldn't call that "buried in the acknowledgements section." I wish more software projects would present themselves in this way actually. Inevitably everything is built upon prior art, so it makes sense to say where the ideas came from or which parts are novel (if any - sometimes packaging together a bunch of existing ideas is valuable in itself).
It sure beats "[project] is a new key-value store that is even faster than [other project]".
