The question
How can CDC histories and frequently updated profiles avoid storing unchanged fields repeatedly while supporting efficient historical reads?
This is a proposed research direction. No novel algorithm, completed benchmark or performance gain is claimed.
Why it matters
CDC, audit and customer-data platforms could retain more history with lower storage costs.
Search space
Field-level deltas, periodic full records, shared dictionaries and indexed reconstruction chains.
What would count as progress?
- Exact reconstruction of every version
- bytes per update
- ingestion throughput
- point-in-time lookup latency.
A useful result improves a measured trade-off against strong baselines on held-out workloads, with reproducible code and documented limitations.
Baselines and boundaries
Compare full-version storage and simple delta chains. Include deletes, schema changes, sparse updates and long histories; bound reconstruction depth.
Starting reference
Where you could contribute
Help define representative, legally shareable workloads; critique the correctness contract; implement baselines; propose candidates; or reproduce measurements. Negative results and failure cases are useful contributions.
A detailed research brief is being prepared. Access requests will become available when that brief and the request service are ready.