This is a common question that we’ve encountered in the past during our PoC process.

Question:

How does compression work in ICE? What factors affect compression speed and the amount data can be compressed?

Answer:

ICE is a column-oriented database it means that data are compressed and stored by columns. The second important thing to note is that data within one column are divided into Data Packs. Each Data Pack contains 64K (65536) values and it is being compressed and stored separately. This is a key ICE feature that let to achieve very good compression ratio.

Numeric compression is much faster and gives better compression ratio than compression of other data types. So, if possible declare column as number. If not possible it is worth to consider declaring a column as LOOKUP.