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This package implements a number of different bitmap indexes compressed with Word-Aligned Hybrid code. These indexes differ in their bitmap encoding methods and binning options. The basic bitmap index compressed with WAH has been shown to answer one-dimensional queries in time that is proportional to the number of hits in theory. In a number of performance measurements, WAH compressed indexes were found to be much more efficient than other indexes [CIKM 2001] [SSDBM 2002] [DOLAP 2002]. One of the crucial step in achieving these efficiency is to be able to perform bitwise OR operations on a large compressed bitmaps efficiently without decompression [VLDB 2004]. Numerous other bitmap encodings and binning strategies are implemented in this software package, please refer to indexSpec.html for descriptions on how to access these indexes and refer to our publications for extensive studies on these methods. FastBit was primarily developed to test these techniques for improving compressed bitmap indexes. Even though, it has grown to include a small number other useful data analysis functions, its primary strength is still in having a diversity of efficient compressed bitmap indexes.
The name IBIS was used by John because it was the only reasonably short
English word that contains the abbreviation BI (for Bitmap Index).
Moreover, it is the name
of an
attractive bird
and a
comic book superhero. However, most people don't associate it with any
thing of speed or power. We eventually settled on the name FastBit
following a suggestion from Arie, because it is much more direct in
expressing the notion of speed. However, by that time, a significant
amount of code has been written in the name space of
ibis, so the name IBIS is stuck.
A reasonable way to harmonize the two names is to say that the current version of FastBit is code named IBIS, where IBIS is the abbreviation of an Implementation of Bitmap Indexing System or Ibis Bitmap Indexing System.
PS: The following is the face of a
more recent rendition of
Ibis in
"The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible" (2007).
ibis command line tool. This is a
useful command line tool for users who don't wish to write their own
program to use FastBit indexing functions.
make docs from the top level directory of the
source code.
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