Storage of row-column data

摘要

Table data (201) is stored by parsing the table data into columns (221, 215, 209) of values, formatting each column into a data stream, and transferring each data stream to a storage device for storage as a continuous strip of data. The strip of data is stored as a file (223, 225; 217, 219; 211, 213) that is not structured as a series of pages. The formatting of the data stream may include compressing the column values to minimize the length of the data strip. A particular compression procedure may be used that derives a code for each value in the column from a number of occurrences of the value in the column and replaces the value in the data stream with the corresponding code.