Dictionary-based order-preserving string compression for main memory column stores

Column-oriented database systems [19, 23] perform better than traditional row-oriented database systems on analytical workloads such as those found in decision support and business intelligence applications. Moreover, recent work [1, 24] has shown that lightweight compression schemes significantly improve the query processing performance of these systems. One such a lightweight compression scheme is to use a dictionary in order to replace long (variable-length) values of a certain domain with shorter (fixedlength) integer codes. In order to further improve expensive query operations such as sorting and searching, column-stores often use order-preserving compression schemes. In contrast to the existing work, in this paper we argue that orderpreserving dictionary compression does not only pay off for attributes with a small fixed domain size but also for long string attributes with a large domain size which might change over time. Consequently, we introduce new data structures that effi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Carsten Binnig, Stefan Hildenbrand, Franz Färber
• Keywords: Database, Lightweight Compression Schemes, Order-preserving Compression Schemes, Order-preserving Dictionary Compression, SIGMOD 2009