That is a certain type of encoding. There is always overhead with this type. Columnar databases often provide lots of different encoding options (mixed in with

That is a certain type of encoding. There is always overhead with this type. Columnar databases often provide lots of different encoding options (mixed in with compression) for these type of things. Products like Vertica can build the associativity for you ahead of time so you don't even have to maintain it. Also, I believe you misunderstood how a columnar storage would work as your example would be for encoding values on a single row where I was referring to a column type.