Chris speaks with H.O. Maycotte and Troy Lanier of Pilosa, a new kind of index — a distributed bitmap index — that aims to solve a major problem for everyone who works with data sets of 1TB or more.

Pilosa sits on top of, rather than within, data stores, and because it’s a bitmap index, it’s relatively small in volume, which means it can run in-memory rather than on disk. It executes queries on any persistent storage at breakneck speeds. We think it’s faster than anything else on earth.

As open-source software, Pilosa is available today on GitHub. The first version includes production-tested features, including single and multi-node index support, replication, algorithm plugins, a data importer, and basic cluster management.