1. A system for compressing, storing and searching genomic sequence data, comprising: a storage sub-system; and an information retrieval sub-system; each such sub-system comprising at least one hardware processor, and computer memory that stores computer program instructions; the storage sub-system comprising first program code executed by a hardware processor to pre-process and store the genomic sequence data into a database, and a links table, to provide efficient storage of the genomic sequence data and thereby improve operation of the system; the information retrieval sub-system comprising second program code executed by a hardware processor to search the genomic sequence data as it has been stored in the storage sub-system, to provide efficient information retrieval of the genomic sequence data and thereby improve operation of the system; the first program code of the storage sub-system comprising: program code to receive and analyze the genomic sequence data, wherein analyzing the genomic sequence data includes determining whether a fragment of the genomic sequence data is similar to a known fragment of the genomic sequence data; program code, responsive to a determination that a fragment of the genomic sequence data is similar to a known fragment, to associate the fragment with a pointer to the genomic sequence data, together with a compact list identifying one or more edits that, when applied to the known fragment, produce the fragment identified by the pointer; program code that, with respect to each segment of the stream that is not similar to any known fragment, stores each such segment in the database; program code to store each pointer in the links table; the second program code of the information retrieval sub-system comprising: program code to receive and process a query, the program code to receive and process the query configured to (i) search the database to locate one or more first hits passing a first, coarse threshold; (ii) for each first hit, examine the links table to identify other segments of the genomic sequence data as represented in the database that potentially align to the first hit; (iii) for each such other segment of the genomic sequence data that potentially aligns to the first hit, recover an actual segment from the genomic sequence data; and (iv) search the actual segment to locate one or more second hits passing a second, fine-grained threshold; wherein searching the database using the first, coarse threshold and recovering the one or more actual segments against which the second, fine-grained threshold is applied enables the second program code to respond to the query without having to decompress information in the database prior to analysis, thereby yielding a search runtime proportional to a size of the database to facilitate the efficient information retrieval of the genomic sequence data.