Inverted indexes vs. bitmap indexes in decision support systems

Abstract

Bitmap indexes are widely used in Decision Support Systems (DSSs) to improve query performance. In this paper, we evaluate the use of compressed inverted indexes with adapted query processing strategies from Information Retrieval as an alternative. In a thorough experimental evaluation on both synthetic data and data from the Star Schema Benchmark, we show that inverted indexes are more compact than bitmap indexes in almost all cases. This compactness combined with efficient query processing strategies results in inverted indexes outperforming bitmap indexes for most queries, often significantly.