Select-based random access to variable-byte encodings

Enormous datasets are a common occurence today and compressing them is often beneficial. Fast direct access to any element in the compressed data is a requirement in the field of compressed data structures, which is not easily supported with traditional compression methods. Variable-byte encoding is a method for compressing integers of different byte lengths. It removes unused leading bytes and adds an additional continuation bit to each byte to denote whether the compressed integer continues to the next byte or not. An existing solution using a rank data structure performs well in this given task. This thesis introduces an alternative solution using a select data structure and compares the two implementations. An experimentation is also done on retrieving a subarray from the compressed data structure. The rank implementation performs better on data containing mostly small integers. The select implementation benefits on larger integers. The select implementation has significant advantages on subarray fetching due to how the data is compressed