As I’ve discussed in some of my previous posts, there are quite a few data types that cannot be part of a Columstore index. While there are fewer restrictions in SQL Server 2014, they still exist. I find myself constantly looking back at Books Online trying to make sure data types in my tables don’t contain any of those restricted data types. It would be much easier to know from day one which tables I need to redesign, or at least which columns I need to exclude from a non-clustered Columnstore index. This is why I have created the following...

In a previous post about non-clustered columnstore indexes, I mentioned the creation of an index is a very memory intensive operation. Sometimes the memory grant needed exceeds what is currently available on your server. So what do you do about it? SQL Server requires a minimal amount of memory in order to create a columnstore index. This can be calculated as Memory Grant Request in MB = ((4.2 * number of columns in the columnstore index) + 68) * Degree of Parallelism + (number of string columns * 34). If there is not enough physical memory available to create the...

SQL Server 2012 introduced non-clustered columnstore indexes, and SQL Server 2014 gave us clustered columnstore indexes. Both share the same technology for performance boosts, and they both share the same algorithms for compression. However, the compression will depend on the data you are storing. SQL Server uses a mechanism of row groups, segments, encoding and compression to store the data for columnstore indexes. First the data is horizontally divided into row groups, where each group contains approximately 1 million rows. Next, the row groups are vertically partitioned into segments, where each column of the table is its own segment. Those...

First introduced in SQL Server 2012, the Columnstore index is a new in-memory feature that allows for the creation of indexes that are stored in a column-wise fashion. It is targeted for data warehouses and can improve query performance by 10 to 100x. A columnstore index stores data in a different type of index page as well as heavily compressing the data. It also introduces a new batch execution mode that greatly increases processing speed and reduces CPU utilization. The combination of the new storage type, the compressed data, and batch mode processing allows SQL Server to read less data...