1. 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, 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, wherein the original time series is S=(s(t 1 ), . . . , s(t n )) with n values, the shape dictionary is D={φ i , iεI} with each atom φ i =(φ i (t 1 ), . . . ,φ i (t n )) of the dictionary being a set of signal samples, and said weighted superposition of atoms is S ⁡ ( t ) = ∑ i = 1 k ⁢ ⁢ α i ⁢ φ i ⁡ ( t ) , wherein the α i are weight coefficients determined to fit the signal samples to the time series.
1. 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, 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, wherein the original time series is S=(s(t 1 ), . . . , s(t n )) with n values, the shape dictionary is D={φ i , iεI} with each atom φ i =(φ i (t 1 ), . . . ,φ i (t n )) of the dictionary being a set of signal samples, and said weighted superposition of atoms is S ⁡ ( t ) = ∑ i = 1 k ⁢ ⁢ α i ⁢ φ i ⁡ ( t ) , wherein the α i are weight coefficients determined to fit the signal samples to the time series. 2. The computer readable program storage device of claim 1 , wherein determining whether answering said query using said compressed time series is faster comprises calculating a ratio of a number of affected chunks in the compressed time series over a number of affected signal values of the original time series, where a speedup of query execution is proportional to said ratio.