It turns out I actually did go to school.

I just had a stupiphany that would have been great if it had happened six months ago, when I had the option of submitting a thesis. Whoops!

See, you could store bitmap indices on a varchar field in a database as a two-dimensional black-and-white image for each character position! Normally you wouldn’t use bitmaps for text because the density would be less than 1%, but what if you compressed them like PNGs? You could save a huge amount of disk space, because sparsity would improve the compression ratio, and clock cycles aren’t nearly as valuable as disk access in this kind of situation so the decompression would be parallelizable. The binary operations would reduce wildcard search time by like an order of magnitude! Hell, you could probably store an average-value flattened composite for returning more relevant results faster, and since varchars only go to 256 you could do it as a standard grayscale image! And imagine the data mining you could do on a map like that, pattern recognition, domain linguistics, not to mention just rasterizing it and putting it on your wall…

I promise there are people out there to whom this makes sense. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll write a paper.