Revisiting Data Compression in Column-Stores

Data compression is widely used in contemporary column-oriented DBMSes to lower space usage and to speed up query processing. Pioneering systems have introduced compression to tackle the disk bandwidth bottleneck by trading CPU processing power for it. The main issue of this is a trade-off between the compression ratio and the decompression CPU cost. Existing results state that light-weight compression with small decompression costs outperforms heavy-weight compression schemes in column-stores. However, since the time these results were obtained, CPU, RAM, and disk performance have advanced considerably. Moreover, novel compression algorithms have emerged.