US Patent 7024414 Storage of row-column data

Table data is stored by parsing the table data into columns 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 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.