Data stored in a column-oriented manner is encoded using a data mining algorithm for finding column patterns among a set of data tuples, where each data tuple contains a set of columns, and the data mining algorithm treats all columns and all column combinations and column ordering similarly or in the same manner when looking for column patterns. Column values are ordered occurring in the column patterns based on their frequencies into a prefix tree, where the prefix tree defines a pattern order. The data tuples are sorted according to the pattern order, resulting in sorted data tuples, and columns of the sorted data tuples are encoded using run-length encoding.