Relational database compression using augmented vector quantization

Data compression is one way to alleviate the I/O bottleneck problem faced by I/O-intensive applications such as databases. However, this approach is not widely used because of the lack of suitable database compression techniques. In this paper, we design and implement a novel database compression technique based on vector quantization (VQ). VQ is a data compression technique with wide applicability in speech and image coding, but it is not directly suitable for databases because it is lossy. We show how one may use a lossless version of vector quantization to reduce database space storage requirements and improve disk I/O bandwidth.<>