CHAPTER 34

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Introduction to Columnstore Indexes

Columnstore indexes are Enterprise Edition feature, introduced in SQL Server 2012. They are part of the new family of technologies called xVelocity, which optimizes the performance of analytic queries that scan and aggregate large amounts of data.

Columnstore indexes use a different storage format for data, storing compressed data on a per-column rather than a per-row basis. This storage format benefits query processing in a Data Warehousing environment where, although queries typically read a very large number of rows, they work with just a subset of the columns from a table.

Design and implementation ...

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