Serf: Streaming Error-Bounded Floating-Point Compression

Summary: Serf is a streaming, error-bounded floating-point compressor for IoT time series, with Serf-Qt (quantize + Elias gamma) and Serf-XOR (lossy, XOR-based). Novel data-offset to boost leading zeros and a trailing-zero–oriented approximation with pruning enable high compression; a real-system prototype on 13 datasets vs 17 baselines shows Serf-XOR often offers the lowest end-to-end time under bandwidth limits. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hfdbfd04425f91fef
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.3971959e-05
Overall Rank: 8,057 | 45.83%
DOI: 10.1145/3725353

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ruiyuan Li (Chongqing University; Start Lab)
2. Zechao Chen (Chongqing University; Start Lab)
3. Ruyun Lu (Chongqing University; Start Lab)
4. Xiaolong Xu (Chongqing University; Start Lab)
5. Guangchao Yang (Chongqing University; Start Lab)
6. Chao Chen (Chongqing University)
7. Jie Bao (JD Group)
8. Yu Zheng (JD Group)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{li_sigmod25,
        title = {{Serf: Streaming Error-Bounded Floating-Point Compression}},
        author = {Li, Ruiyuan and Chen, Zechao and Lu, Ruyun and Xu, Xiaolong and Yang, Guangchao and Chen, Chao and Bao, Jie and Zheng, Yu},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '25},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3725353},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3725353},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,471	Kangaroo: Efficient Lossless Floating-Point Compression via Dynamic Reference Selection	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,065	DeXOR: Enabling xor in Decimal Space for Streaming Lossless Compression of Floating-point Data	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
42	Fast Subsequence Matching in Time-Series Databases	1994	SIGMOD	0.00045773967
148	Gorilla: A Fast, Scalable, In-Memory Time Series Database	2015	VLDB	0.0002900671
1,347	Chimp: Efficient Lossless Floating Point Compression for Time Series Databases	2022	VLDB	0.00010950342
1,637	Apache IoTDB: Time-series Database for Internet of Things	2020	VLDB	0.00010013276
1,713	Online Piece-wise Linear Approximation of Numerical Streams with Precision Guarantees	2009	VLDB	9.8143771e-05
1,911	ModelarDB: Modular Model-Based Time Series Management with Spark and Cassandra	2018	VLDB	9.3912399e-05
1,973	Decomposed Bounded Floats for Fast Compression and Queries	2021	VLDB	9.2834606e-05
2,928	ALP: Adaptive Lossless floating-Point Compression	2023	SIGMOD	7.8424335e-05
3,580	Elf: Erasing-based Lossless Floating-Point Compression	2023	VLDB	7.1923905e-05
3,750	NET-FLi: On-the-fly Compression, Archiving and Indexing of Streaming Network Traffic	2010	VLDB	7.0527908e-05
4,593	Sim-Piece: Highly Accurate Piecewise Linear Approximation through Similar Segment Merging	2023	VLDB	6.5127988e-05
6,682	Hierarchical Residual Encoding for Multiresolution Time Series Compression	2023	SIGMOD	5.7093663e-05
6,694	MOST: Model-Based Compression with Outlier Storage for Time Series Data	2023	SIGMOD	5.7068014e-05
7,975	TRACE: Real-time Compression of Streaming Trajectories in Road Networks	2021	VLDB	5.41472e-05
8,033	FCBench: Cross-Domain Benchmarking of Lossless Compression for Floating-Point Data	2024	VLDB	5.4034154e-05
9,703	Toward Quantity-of-Interest Preserving Lossy Compression for Scientific Data	2023	VLDB	5.1380895e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,682	Hierarchical Residual Encoding for Multiresolution Time Series Compression	2023	SIGMOD
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3	10,849	Error-bounded Point Cloud Compression Using Truncated Octahedron Quantization	2026	VLDB
4	2,928	ALP: Adaptive Lossless floating-Point Compression	2023	SIGMOD
5	12,072	An Evaluation of Methods of Compressing Doubles	2020	SIGMOD
6	1,347	Chimp: Efficient Lossless Floating Point Compression for Time Series Databases	2022	VLDB
7	11,065	DeXOR: Enabling xor in Decimal Space for Streaming Lossless Compression of Floating-point Data	2026	VLDB
8	8,797	Camel: Efficient Compression of Floating-Point Time Series	2024	SIGMOD
9	10,471	Kangaroo: Efficient Lossless Floating-Point Compression via Dynamic Reference Selection	2026	SIGMOD
10	3,580	Elf: Erasing-based Lossless Floating-Point Compression	2023	VLDB