Fewer Bits, Same Answers: Succinct and Compressed Data Structures

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h

In São Paulo, a customer-segment index is seven times bigger than the data it indexes. In part sixteen of The Deep End's Data Structures series, platform lead Ana Beatriz Costa and new engineer Kofi Asante find out how few bits you really need, and how to answer questions without unpacking anything. Rank and select, a binary tree in two bits per node, Elias–Fano lists, Roaring bitmaps and the wavelet trees that let a laptop search a human genome. Ana Beatriz and Kofi are fictional; the papers and systems are real.

Chapters

00:00:00 Cold open: the index that was bigger than the data

00:02:43…