Bitmap indexing has been touted as a promising approach for processing complex adhoc queries in readmostly environments, like those of decision support systems. Nevertheless, only few possible bitmap schemes have been proposed in the past and very little is known about the spacetime tradeoff that they offer. The paper present a general framework to study the design space of bitmap indexes for selection queries and examine the diskspace and time characteristics that the various alternative index choices offer. In particular, it draw a parallel between bitmap indexing and number representation in different number systems,
and define a space of two orthogonal dimensions that captures a wide array of bitmap indexes, both old and new.
Within that space, it identify the following interesting points:
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The timeoptimal bitmap index;
The spaceoptimal bitmap index;
The bitmap index with the optimal spacetime tradeoff (knee).
The timeoptimal bitmap index under a given diskspace constraint.
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It also examine the impact of bitmap compression and bitmap buffering on the spacetime tradeoffs among those indexes. As part of this work, it also describes a bitmapindexbased evaluation algorithm for selection queries that represents an improvement over earlier proposals.