Also see my comment above, but you find this kind of storage commonly in game development [0] where you are optimizing for batch access on specific columns to minimize cache misses. It's usually used as the storage layer for Entity Component Systems. It's also called data-oriented design [1]

[0] http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-oriented_design