Data compression and database performance

Data compression is widely used in data management to save storage space and network bandwidth. The authors outline the performance improvements that can be achieved by exploiting data compression in query processing. The novel idea is to leave data in compressed state as long as possible, and to only uncompress data when absolutely necessary. They show that many query processing algorithms can manipulate compressed data just as well as decompressed data, and that processing compressed data can speed query processing by a factor much larger than the compression factor