While the analytics community has its attention turned away towards Hadoop Summit 2015, Pivotal Software Inc. is acquiring a little-known startup called Quickstep Technologies, LLC in a small but strategic deal that could provide its relational database with a much-needed needed performance edge. That’s thanks to a unique technology that the team originally developed at the University of Wisconsin.

Based on a 2013 paper co-authored by founder Jignesh Patel, who is a professor at the school’s Computer Science department, BitWeave provides a way of speeding up the way columnar stores such as Pivotal’s Greenplum Database execute queries. Instead of handling tables directly the old fashioned way, the technology maps out each to a much smaller logical representation.

The resulting values, which are referred to as fixed-length order-preserving codes, are arranged into an array that emulates a column at the bit level in which processors operate. These abstractions take advantage of the different operating conditions that exist on that miniaturized scale to allow data from multiple columns to be ingested into the on-board registers at once.

That results in a significant speed improvement over traditional approaches that spread out that work over multiple processor circles. BitWeave can process data upwards of nine times faster than conventional scanning methods depending on its configuration and the size of the increments at which order-preserving codes are fed into the chip.

Added up across the upwards of tens of thousands of cores that can be found in the typical enterprise-scale analytics environment, that translates into a noticeable improvements at the speed queries are executed. That same utilization boost also allows organizations to optimize their hardware, thus killing two birds with one stone,

The deal will see Pivotal license the technology from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for integration into Greenplum Database and HAWQ, a similarly columnar structured query interface for Hadoop. No less importantly, the transaction will also see Patel and the team of students with whom he founded Quickstep in January join the company’s ranks, which should provides a welcome strategic boost for both current and future analytic initiatives.

Photo via Pivotal