Given a static reference string R and a source string S , a relative compression of S with respect to R is an encoding of S as a sequence of references to substrings of R . Relative compression schemes are a classic model of compression and have recently proved very successful for compressing highly-repetitive massive data sets such as genomes and web-data. We initiate the study of relative compression in a dynamic setting where the compressed source string S is subject to edit operations. The goal is to maintain the compressed representation compactly, while supporting edits and allowing efficient random access to the (uncompressed) source string. We present new data structures that achieve optimal time for updates and queries while using space linear in the size of the optimal relative compression, for nearly all combinations of parameters. We also present solutions for restricted and extended sets of updates. To achieve these results, we revisit the dynamic partial sums problem and the substring concatenation problem. We present new optimal or near optimal bounds for these problems. Plugging in our new results we also immediately obtain new bounds for the string indexing for patterns with wildcards problem and the dynamic text and static pattern matching problem.

Given a string S of length n, the classic string indexing problem is to preprocess S into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern queries. In the deterministic variant the goal is to solve the string indexing problem without any randomization (at preprocessing time or query time). In the packed variant the strings are stored with several character in a single word, giving us the opportunity to read multiple characters simultaneously. Our main result is a new string index in the deterministic and packed setting. Given a packed string S of length n over an alphabet s, we show how to preprocess S in O(n) (deterministic) time and space O(n) such that given a packed pattern string of length m we can support queries in (deterministic) time O(m/a + log m + log log s), where a = w /log s is the number of characters packed in a word of size w = log n. Our query time is always at least as good as the previous best known bounds and whenever several characters are packed in a word, i.e., log s << w, the query times are faster.