Understanding Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server Part 1

Recently I reviewed filtered indexes, this time let’s look at columnstore indexes. These indexes are very useful for data warehouse workloads and large tables. They can improve query performance by a factor of 10 in some cases, so knowing and understanding how they work is important if you work in an environment with larger scaled data. Now, I admit when these first were introduced in SQL Server 2012 I found them very intimidating (additionally, you couldn’t update them directly). For me, anytime you say columnstore, my mind tends to set off alarms saying wait stay away, this is too complicated.… Continue Reading