1. Blazing-Fast Performance:
A Technical Best Practices Tour with ColumnStore Index
Susan Price
Senior Program Manager

2. Is this your data warehouse experience?
Waiting ….

3. Columnstore indexes
Waiting ….

4. Agenda Benefits Demo Overview How to use ColumnStore Indexes
Batch mode query execution
How to use ColumnStore Indexes
Experiences with customer data
Best practices

5. BenEfits of columnstore indexes
Faster, interactive query response time
Easier data exploration
Better decision
Reduced physical DB design effort
Fewer indexes
Reduced need for summary aggregates and indexed views
May eliminate need for OLAP cubes
Transparent to the application
Less hardware needed for given workload

6. Demo

7. What is a columnstore index?… C1 C2 C3 C4
Stores data column-wise
Each page stores data from a single column
Highly compressed
About 2x better than PAGE compression
More data fits in memory
Each column can be accessed independently
Fetch only needed columns
Can dramatically reduce IO

8. Batch Mode Query Execution
But Wait, there’s more
Would you rather process your data like this …
Batch Mode Query Execution
Vector-oriented processing
Compact data representation
Highly efficient algorithms
Better parallelism
… or like this?

9. Easy to use No need to rewrite application
Create a ColumnStore Index after you create and load the table
CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX ncci
ON myTable(OrderDate, ProductID, SaleAmount)
The optimizer makes a cost-based decision
When to use the ColumnStore Index
When to use batch mode processing
Memory management is automatic
New object cache for ColumnStore structures
New memory broker manages memory allocation
Best performance when data is in memory
Data not required to fit in memory
Options for loading data
Use partition switching
Build ColumnStore Index on staging table
Disable ColumnStore Index, load data, rebuild index

10. Observed compression ratios
Data Set
Uncompressed Table Size (MB)
ColumnStore Index Size
Compression Ratio
Cosmetics
1,302
88.5
14.7
SQL
1,431
166
8.6
Xbox
1,045
202
5.2
MS Sales
642,000
126,000
5.1
Web Analytics
2,560
553
4.6
Telecom
2,905
727
4.0
1.8X better compression than SQL Server PAGE compression

11. real customer experiences
Customer Type
Industry segment/ Application
Measure
Without ColumnStore Index (sec)
With ColumnStore Index
Improvement
External
Online services
Query
1020 3
340x
Retail
1080 63
17.1x
Healthcare
Set of 6 Queries
73894
12782
5.8x
Internal
HR reporting
Avg. response time on production system
220 66
3.3x
Financial reporting
3 Queries
Each > 50x
Queries taking longer than 10 min
90% reduction

12. Best Practices: When to build a Columnstore index
Workload
Read-mostly
Mostly append new data
Star join queries
Queries to scan and aggregate large data volumes
Workflow
Permits partitioning (or disable/rebuild) to handle new data
Typically a nightly load window
Data selection
Build ColumnStore Indexes on large fact tables
Consider ColumnStore Indexes for large dimension tables

13. Best Practices: building a Columnstore index
Include all columns in the columnstore index
Don’t use to seek into the row
Order of listed columns not important
Convert decimal/numeric to precision <= 18
If possible
Use integer types when possible
More compact representation
More opportunity for early filtering
Ensure sufficient memory to build the columnstore index
Create the columnstore index from a clustered index
Better segment elimination if filter is on a key column

14. Best Practices: Writing queries
Consider modifying queries to hit “sweet spot”
Star joins
Inner joins
Aggregations
Keep statistics up to date
Remember that ColumnStore Index is not sorted
Consider using hints if needed
Pay attention to fundamentals
No Magic Bullet
Query performance still affected by
Schema design
Query design
Cardinality estimates

15. Columnstore indexes in a nutshell
ColumnStore technology +
Advanced query processing
Astonishing speedup for DW queries
Great compression

16. Thank You! ColumnStore Indexes white paper
Resources
ColumnStore Indexes white paper
ColumnStore Index FAQs (search for technet columnstore)
ColumnStore Index Blog
(with link to YouTube video)
YouTube videos

17. Further. Forward. Faster.
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