Columnar Compression: Dictionary & Run-Length Encoding (2D)

Every analytical data warehouse — Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or a raw Parquet file sitting in a data lake — leans on the same two tricks to shrink a column before it ever touches disk: dictionary encoding, which swaps repeated strings for small integer codes, and run-length encoding, which collapses a stretch of identical values into one (value, count) pair. This 2D companion renders the same live data-warehouse column as a flat strip of coloured blocks above a byte-size comparison chart, letting you tune row count, cardinality and how clustered/sorted the values are while raw size, encoded size and compression ratio update from the same formulas real columnar engines use.