HICAMP bitmap: space-efficient updatable bitmap index for in-memory databases

Bitmap represents an efficient indexing structure for querying large amounts of data and is widely deployed in data-warehouse applications. While the size of a bitmap scales linearly with the number of rows in a table, due to its sparseness, it can be greatly reduced via compression based on run-length encoding. However, updating a compressed bitmap is expensive due to the encoding and decoding overheads, in particular, as re-compression can change the compressed sequence length and data layout. Due to this problem, bitmap indices only perform well for read-only workloads. In this paper, we propose a bitmap index structure which is both space-efficient and allows fast updates, by building on top of a smart memory model called HICAMP. As a consequence, our approach enables bitmap indices for workloads that exhibit high update ratios as in OLTP workloads. We also present a new multi-bit bitmap design which addresses the candidate checking problem. In our experiments, the HICAMP bitmap index demonstrates 3~12x reduction in size over B-tree and 8~30x over other commonly used indexing structures such as Red-Black tree, while supporting efficient updates simultaneously.