Brighthouse: An Analytic Data Warehouse for Ad-hoc Queries

Brighthouse is a column-oriented data warehouse with an automatically tuned, ultra small overhead metadata layer called Knowledge Grid, that is used as an alternative to classical indexes. The advantages of column-oriented data storage, as well as data compression have already been welldocumented, especially in the context of analytic, decision support querying. This paper demonstrates additional benefits resulting from Knowledge Grid for compressed, columnoriented databases. In particular, we explain how it assists in query optimization and execution, by minimizing the need of data reads and data decompression.