General-purpose compression for efficient retrieval

Compression of databases not only reduces space requirements but can also reduce overall retrieval times. In text databases, compression of documents based on semistatic modeling with words has been shown to be both practical and fast. Similarly, for specific applications—such as databases of integers or scientific databases—specially designed semistatic compression schemes work well. We propose a scheme for general‐purpose compression that can be applied to all types of data stored in large collections. We describe our approach—which we call RAY—in detail, and show experimentally the compression available, compression and decompression costs, and performance as a stream and random‐access technique. We show that, in many cases, RAY achieves better compression than an efficient Huffman scheme and popular adaptive compression techniques, and that it can be used as an efficient general‐purpose compression scheme.