Difference-Huffman Coding of Multidimensional Databases

A new compression method called difference-Huffman coding (DHC) is introduced in this paper. It is verified empirically that DHC results in a smaller multidimensional physical representation than those for other previously published techniques (single count header compression, logical position compression, base-offset compression and difference sequence compression). The article examines how caching influences the expected retrieval time of the multidimensional and table representations of relations. A model is proposed for this, which is then verified with empirical data. Conclusions are drawn, based on the model and the experiment, about when one physical representation outperforms another in terms of retrieval time. Over the tested range of available memory, the performance for the multidimensional representation was always much quicker than for the table representation.