AFC: An adaptive lossless floating-point compression algorithm in time series database

Abstract

The time series database is a specialized type of database specifically designed for storing and analyzing time series data. Compression of time series data is crucial for its performance. However, efficiently compressing time series data, particularly floating-point data, remains challenging. Existing compression algorithms are efficient for only a limited range of data patterns, indicating a lack of self-adaptation. In this paper, we propose an effective and Adaptive lossless Floating-point Compression algorithm AFC for time series databases. We devise four unique compression strategies, and based on the data patterns, AFC dynamically selects the appropriate strategy. These strategies handle data compression for diverse data patterns, enhancing the compression ratio and efficiency. The most suitable strategy is employed to achieve an optimal compression ratio. We compared our AFC algorithm with four state-of-the-art compression algorithms, namely Gorilla, FPC, TSXor, and Chimp, as well as various general-purpose compression algorithms such as LZ4 and Snappy. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves an improvement of at least 20% in compression ratio and even up to 100% on certain datasets.