Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals

Columnstore indexes

SQL Server 2012 introduces a new feature called columnstore indexes, which are part of a new family of technologies called xVelocity, all focused on optimizing in-memory processing. Columnstore indexes completely change the way data is organized and managed and don’t use the familiar B-tree structure (described early in this chapter). Columnstore indexes store each column individually using a special kind of compression called Vertipaq compression, which is also used in Analysis Services and Power Pivot.

Columnstore indexes are particularly beneficial in data warehouse systems in which your queries are accessing most, if not all, of the rows in a very large table, but only referencing a subset of the columns. In fact, even if ...