Data Compression in Scientific and Statistical Databases

Scientific and statistical database systems heavily depend on data compression techniques to make possible the management and storage of their large databases. The efficiency of data compression methods has a signficant impact on the overall performance of these systems. The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of data compression to scientific/statistical databases, to discuss the pros and cons of data compression, and to survey data compression techniques relevant to scientific/statistical databases. The emphasis is on the basic idea, motivation, and tradeoffs of each approach. Both software and hardware methods are covered. The paper is concluded by a discussion of several points of research that seem worthy of further investigation.