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 well-documented, especially in the context of analytic, decision support querying. This paper demonstrates additional benefits resulting from Knowledge Grid for compressed, column-oriented databases. In particular, we explain how it assists in query optimization and execution, by minimizing the need of data reads and data decompression.