21.6. Compressed storage of short arrays

Prev		Next

Neo4j will try to store your primitive arrays in a compressed way, so as to save disk space and possibly an I/O operation. To do that, it employs a "bit-shaving" algorithm that tries to reduce the number of bits required for storing the members of the array. In particular:

For each member of the array, it determines the position of leftmost set bit.
Determines the largest such position among all members of the array
It reduces all members to that number of bits
Stores those values, prefixed by a small header.

That means that when even a single negative value is included in the array then the natural size of the primitives will be used.

There is a possibility that the result can be inlined in the property record if:

It is less than 24 bytes after compression
It has less than 64 members

For example, an array long[] {0L, 1L, 2L, 4L} will be inlined, as the largest entry (4) will require 3 bits to store so the whole array will be stored in 4*3=12 bits. The array long[] {-1L, 1L, 2L, 4L} however will require the whole 64 bits for the -1 entry so it needs 64*4 = 32 bytes and it will end up in the dynamic store.