The question
Can compact indexes avoid more irrelevant reads on high-cardinality columns without excessive construction or query overhead?
This is a proposed research direction. No novel algorithm, completed benchmark or performance gain is claimed.
Why it matters
Columnar databases and lakehouse engines could reduce storage reads for selective queries.
Search space
Membership filters, range summaries, allocation of index space and combinations of summaries.
What would count as progress?
- No missed matches
- false-positive rate
- index bytes
- build/query CPU
- actual data reads avoided.
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 Parquet-style Bloom filters and min/max statistics at equal memory budgets. Test absent keys, skew, ranges and changing selectivity; verify reader integration and measure index I/O too.
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.