10. A non-transitory program storage device readable by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executed by the computer to perform the method steps for accelerating time series data base queries, the method comprising the steps of: segmenting an original time series of signal values into non-overlapping chunks, where a time-scale for each of the chunks is much less than the time scale of the entire time series; representing time series signal values in each chunk as a weighted superposition of atoms that are members of a shape dictionary, to create a compressed time series; storing said original time series and said compressed time series into a database, storing in compressed form additional time-series derived from said original time-series to speed up a specific query; representing squares of time series signal values in each chunk as a weighted superposition of atoms that are members of a squared shape dictionary, to create a compressed squared time series, wherein a variance of said original time series is calculated from said compressed time series and said compressed squared time series; determining whether a query is answerable using said compressed time series or said original time series, and whether answering said query using said compressed time series is faster; and if answering the query is faster using the compressed representation, executing the query on weight coefficients of the compressed time series to produce a query result, and translating the query result back into an uncompressed representation.
14. The computer readable program storage device of claim 10 , wherein a shape dictionary used to compress the derived time series is different from the shape dictionary used to compress the original time series.