MonetDB is very efficient column oriented database. I came to know that it follows light weight compression algorithms to speed it up. Can someone tell me more about the implementation of these compression/decompression algorithms in monetDB?
There is currently no compression on primitive values such as integers and floating point numbers. Thus, choosing the appropriate type for your data will make a difference once your tables get large.
The string storage uses pointers to a string heap. Hence, for categorical string values that only contain few distinct values, storage will generally be efficient. More advanced compression methods are in the works, but I do not expect them to be available in the next six months.
Finally, we had great experiences running MonetDB on a force-compressed file system (e.g. BTRFS). This greatly reduces the storage footprint of databases and also reduces the IO time, especially on spinning hard disks.