  Bitmap indexes must be compressed to reduce input/output costs and minimize
CPU usage. To accelerate logical operations (AND, OR, XOR) over bitmaps, we use
techniques based on run-length encoding (RLE), such as Word-Aligned Hybrid
(WAH) compression. These techniques are sensitive to the order of the rows: a
simple lexicographical sort can divide the index size by 9 and make indexes
several times faster. We investigate reordering heuristics based on computed
attribute-value histograms. Simply permuting the columns of the table based on
these histograms can increase the sorting efficiency by 40%.
