As we discuss in the FastLanes paper, the way BtrBlocks implements cascaded encodings (Vortex now) is essentially a return to block-based compression such as Zstd — which we're trying to avoid as much as possible. This design doesn't work well with modern vectorized execution engines or GPUs: the decompression granularity is too large to fit in CPU caches or GPU shared memory. So Vortex ends up being yet another Parquet-like file format, repeating the same mistakes. And if it still underperforms compared to Parquet... what’s the point?

We just released FastLanes v0.1, and more results — including ClickBench — are coming soon. Please do benchmark FastLanes — and keep us posted!