Columnar Storage Compression Algorithms in Analytical Database Engines

By Dr. Elena Rostova, High-Throughput Analytics Group | Published: August 26, 2026 | System Node: DB-COL-774
OLAPColumnar StorageSIMDDatabase InternalsData Compression

Columnar Partitioning and Memory Locality

Unlike traditional row-oriented OLTP stores, modern OLAP analytical databases arrange consecutive values of the same attribute contiguously in physical storage blocks.

This layout drastically maximizes CPU L1/L2 cache locality, enabling vector processing units to execute filtering and aggregation queries at memory bus line rates.

SIMD-Accelerated Bit-Packing and Run-Length Encoding

By combining Run-Length Encoding (RLE) with Bit-Packing and Frame-of-Reference (FoR) compression, columnar storage engines achieve 5x to 10x compression ratios while retaining direct query execution capabilities without decompressing full blocks into host memory.