Patent attributes
SCAN operations for databases where scan time is dependent on a payload size consume too much memory space and computing time as payload sizes increase. A database table is configured to include an additional index mapping column that stores bitmaps related to the corresponding row of the table. Each bit in the bitmap corresponds to a column and indicates whether that column stores a value. Inclusion of an index column in a table decouples the time it takes to perform the SCAN operation on a column from the payload size of data stored in the column. The bitmaps stored in the index column are relatively small and uniform in size, so the SCAN operation on such a database requires only for the bitmap values of the applicable rows to be obtained from the index column and inspected.
