Performance evaluation of word-aligned compression methods for bitmap indices

Bitmap indices are a widely used scheme for large read-only repositories in data warehouses and scientific databases. This binary representation allows the use of bit-wise operations for fast query processing and is typically compressed using run-length encoding techniques. Most bitmap compression techniques are aligned using a fixed encoding length (32 or 64 bits) to avoid explicit decompression during query time. They have been proposed to extend or enhance word-aligned hybrid (WAH) compression. This paper presents a comparative study of four bitmap compression techniques: WAH, PLWAH, CONCISE, and EWAH. Experiments are targeted to identify the conditions under which each method should be applied and quantify the overhead incurred during query processing. Performance in terms of compression ratio and query time is evaluated over synthetic-generated bitmap indices, and results are validated over bitmap indices generated from real data sets. Different query optimizations are explored, query time estimation formulas are defined, and the conditions under which one method should be preferred over another are formalized

Hybrid query optimization for hard-to-compress bit-vectors

Bit-vectors are widely used for indexing and summarizing data due to their efficient processing in modern computers. Sparse bit-vectors can be further compressed to reduce their space requirement. Special compression schemes based on run-length encoders have been designed to avoid explicit decompression and minimize the decoding overhead during query execution. Moreover, highly compressed bit-vectors can exhibit a faster query time than the non-compressed ones. However, for hard-to-compress bit-vectors, compression does not speed up queries and can add considerable overhead. In these cases, bit-vectors are often stored verbatim (non-compressed). On the other hand, queries are answered by executing a cascade of bit-wise operations involving indexed bit-vectors and intermediate results. Often, even when the original bit-vectors are hard to compress, the intermediate results become sparse. It could be feasible to improve query performance by compressing these bit-vectors as the query is executed. In this scenario, it would be necessary to operate verbatim and compressed bit-vectors together. In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework where compressed and verbatim bitmaps can coexist and design algorithms to execute queries under this hybrid model. Our query optimizer is able to decide at run time when to compress or decompress a bit-vector. Our heuristics show that the applications using higher-density bitmaps can benefit from using this hybrid model, improving both their query time and memory utilization

Optimizing Frequency Queries for Data Mining Applications

Data mining algorithms use various Trie and bitmap-based representations to optimize the support (i.e., frequency) counting performance. In this paper, we compare the memory requirements and support counting performance of FP Tree, and Compressed Patricia Trie against several novel variants of vertical bit vectors. First, borrowing ideas from the VLDB domain, we compress vertical bit vectors using WAH encoding. Second, we evaluate the Gray code rank-based transaction reordering scheme, and show that in practice, simple lexicographic ordering, obtained by applying LSB Radix sort, outperforms this scheme. Led by these results, we propose HDO, a novel Hamming-distance-based greedy transaction reordering scheme, and aHDO, a linear-time approximation to HDO. We present results of experiments performed on 15 common datasets with varying degrees of sparseness, and show that HDO- reordered, WAH encoded bit vectors can take as little as 5% of the uncompressed space, while aHDO achieves similar compression on sparse datasets. Finally, with results from over a billion database and data mining style frequency query executions, we show that bitmap-based approaches result in up to hundreds of times faster support counting, and HDO-WAH encoded bitmaps offer the best space-time tradeoff

Bitmap Indexing : Energy Applications and Improvements

Large databases and data warehouses are becoming prevalent for the storage and management of energy data. Accelerating the rates at which data can be retrieved is beneficial not only to allow for more efficient search of the data, but also to be integrated with other energy system tools. In this work, a fast indexing and data retrieval method, known commonly as a bitmap index, is created to facilitate intelligent querying and indexing of data generated by phasor measurement units (PMU) at a rate of 60 Hz. In addition, compression of these bitmap indexes is parallelized, and the performance quality of bitmaps created over this dynamic database are tested. We find that bitmaps are amenable to managing efficient access to large amounts of PMU data. Furthermore, the bitmap-management process will provide decreased access time for data retrieval as well as decreased memory usage. From these experiments, we are able to improve compression times while discovering new research opportunities, decrease access times to the PMU database by 30 times the conventional method currently utilizes, and introduce a feasible method for bitmap operations over a dynamic database