(author here, sorry I didn't see this earlier) One of the principles we tried hard to follow is that after building the indices, the query times should be prop

(author here, sorry I didn't see this earlier) One of the principles we tried hard to follow is that after building the indices, the query times should be proportional to the resolution of the plots you're generating. So the difference here is building the data structure that's fundamentally well-suited to interactive visualization. So we push hard to get low latency, and we take trade-offs that will let us generate query results well-suited to create histograms , heatmaps, etc. These are typically multiresolution (sometimes you want mile-wide pixels, sometimes you want yard-wide-pixels, or day-wide pixels vs second-wide pixels) and require some index-building tricks that we hadn't seen combined in the way we did it.