[bugboy73]

DISCLAIMER: I'm one of the Sneller developers

Compression is required to make more efficient use of the available bandwidth and RAM. Although AWS provides up to 100Gb/s networking, we improve the net throughput using compression. Also we cache data on the computing nodes, so storing it in compressed form allows us to store more data on the node.

Our query engine is often limited by memory bandwidth when using uncompressed data. So it needs a lot of data and it needs it fast. Because we cache data in compressed form, decompression is always needed, so it should be as fast as possible. That's the primary reason why we developed Iguana, because a faster decompression results in a faster query engine.