An important issue in compressed database systems is
when to decompress the data during query execution. Traditional
solutions to this problem consisted of simple strate-mark [1]. The query joins the Supplier and Lineitem relations
on a foreign key; the query includes an additional selection
condition involving two string attributes. The string attributes
S COMMENT, L SHIPINSTRUCT, L COMMENT, and S NAME
are compressed using attribute-level dictionary compression
with different dictionaries; none of the compression methods
is order-preserving except the method used for S NAME (Section
2 describes our compression methods in detail). Thus,
during the execution of the example query, the attributes
S COMMENT and L SHIPINSTRUCT need to be decompressed for
computing the join and L COMMENT needs to be decompressed
for the sort.