Leveraging compression in the tableau data engine
Richard Wesley, Paweł Terlecki · 2014
Data sets are growing rapidly and there is an attendant need for tools that facilitate human analysis of them in a timely manner. To help meet this need, column-oriented databases (or "column stores") have come into wide use because of their low latency on analytic workloads. Column stores use a number of techniques to produce these dramatic performance techniques, including the ability to perform operations directly on compressed data. In this paper, we describe how the Tableau Data Engine (an internally developed column store) leverages a number of compression techniques to improve query performance. The approach is simpler than existing systems for operating on compressed data and more unified, removing the necessity for custom data access mechanisms. The approach also uses some novel metadata extraction techniques to improve the choices made by the system's run-time optimizer.