There are some operations that can be efficiently done over the compressed data itself. Compressed bitmap is a good motivating example (and I really liked Roari

There are some operations that can be efficiently done over the compressed data itself. Compressed bitmap is a good motivating example (and I really liked Roaring Bitmap [1]). But I guess that such efficiency is very specific to the exact operation and the viability of general compressed operation is unclear; as a related example, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that does the same over ciphertexts is still an active research problem. [1] https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/RoaringBitmap https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/RoaringBitmap