Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

What’s New for Data Structures, Indexes, and Performance

SQL Server 2012 provides only a few new features and enhancements related to data structures, indexes, and performance.

The main new feature is xVelocity columnstore indexes. This new index, combined with enhanced query processing features, can improve data warehouse query performance by hundreds to thousands of times in some cases and can routinely provide a tenfold speedup for a broad range of decision support queries. Columnstore indexes can limit or eliminate the need to rely on prebuilt aggregates, including user-defined summary tables, and indexed (materialized) views. This chapter describes the physical structure of columnstore indexes and how they improve performance for data warehouse ...