Columnstore indexes are an Enterprise Edition feature introduced in SQL Server 2012. They are part of the new family of technologies called xVelocity(formerly known as VertiPaq), which optimizes the performance of analytical 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 data warehousing, reporting, and analytics environments where, although they typically read a very large ...
