{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","title":"Better bitmap performance with Roaring bitmaps","arxiv_id":"1402.6407","date":"2014-02-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Samy Chambi","Daniel Lemire","Owen Kaser","Robert Godin"],"abstract":"Bitmap indexes are commonly used in databases and search engines. By exploiting bit-level parallelism, they can significantly accelerate queries. However, they can use much memory, and thus we might prefer compressed bitmap indexes. Following Oracle's lead, bitmaps are often compressed using run-length encoding (RLE). Building on prior work, we introduce the Roaring compressed bitmap format: it uses packed arrays for compression instead of RLE. We compare it to two high-performance RLE-based bitmap encoding techniques: WAH (Word Aligned Hybrid compression scheme) and Concise (Compressed `n' Composable Integer Set). On synthetic and real data, we find that Roaring bitmaps (1) often compress significantly better (e.g., 2 times) and (2) are faster than the compressed alternatives (up to 900 times faster for intersections). Our results challenge the view that RLE-based bitmap compression is best.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.6407v10","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.6407v10.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/BeSky/CRoaring","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/BeSky/RoaringBitmap","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/BitSetsNet/BitSetsNet","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/Budome/No","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/CRoaring","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/RoaringBitmap","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/SwiftRoaring","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/gocroaring","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/roaring","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/andreasvc/roaringbitmap","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/casualjim/go-roaring64","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/hochoy18/RoaringBitmap","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/lemire/RoaringBitmap","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"better-bitmap-performance-with-roaring","repo_url":"https://github.com/piotte13/SwiftRoaring","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}