A method for accelerating time series data base queries includes 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 the original time series and the compressed time series into a database, determining whether a query is answerable using the compressed time series or the original time series, and whether answering the query using the compressed time series is faster. If answering the query is faster using the compressed representation, the query is executed on weight coefficients of the compressed time series to produce a query result, and the query result is translated back into an uncompressed representation.