1. Four Rules For Columnstore Query Performance
Joe Obbish

2. About Me Business Intelligence Developer for EHR company
Answer questions on dba.stackexchange.com
Blog about SQL Server at
Done performance tuning for thousands of queries

3. Scope
I work with data warehouses that use on-disk clustered columnstore indexes with very few nonclustered indexes.
Material applies to SQL Server 2016 and 2017.

4. The Consequences of Creative T-SQL
Creative code can enter your database in many different ways:
Your (least) favorite third party reporting tool.
Your (least) favorite end user.
Your (least) favorite developer using an ORM.
Creative code can have different consequences with CCIs compared to rowstore.

5. The Four Rules Take Advantage of Columnstore Features
Define and Maintain your Table
Get Batch Mode
Avoid Some Query Patterns

6. Take Advantage of Columnstore Features
Column elimination
Rowgroup elimination
Aggregate pushdown
String predicate pushdown

7. Column Elimination Compressed data is stored in columnar format.
SELECT * is worse than ever.
UPDATE queries need to read all columns.

8. Rowgroup Elimination
“To determine which rows groups to eliminate, the columnstore index uses metadata to store the minimum and maximum values of each column segment for each rowgroup. When none of the column segment ranges meet the query predicate criteria, the entire rowgroup is skipped without doing any actual IO.”
Doesn’t work for string data types.

9. Aggregate Pushdown Calculate some aggregates at the scan level.
MIN, MAX, AVG, SUM, COUNT, COUNT_BIG
Only works for exact numeric data types that fit within 8 bytes.
Might not work depending on characteristics of compressed data.
Trivial plans can cause issues in SQL Server 2016.

10. String Predicate Pushdown
“With string predicate pushdown, the query execution computes the predicate against the values in the dictionary and if it qualifies, all rows referring to the dictionary value are automatically qualified.”
Including for completeness (no demos).

11. Demos 1

12. The Four Rules Take Advantage of Columnstore Features
Define and Maintain your Table
Get Batch Mode
Avoid Some Query Patterns

13. Is This Bad?

14. Do Index Maintenance
Columnstore maintenance is very different from rowstore index maintenance.
Skipping maintenance can result in reduced query performance, hundreds of wasted GBs of space, and other problems.

15. Use the Right Data Types
Use data types that fit your data as closely as possible.
Different data types have different levels of support for columnstore query performance features.

16. Be Smart About Partitioning
Partitioning is essential for not small columnstore indexes.
Partitioning can actually improve query performance on columnstore indexes!
Avoid partition schemes that are too small or that don’t fit well with your load method.

17. Demos 2

18. The Four Rules Take Advantage of Columnstore Features
Define and Maintain your Table
Get Batch Mode
Avoid Some Query Patterns

19. Batch Mode
Query plan operators can process sets of rows at a time instead of operating row by row.
Operate on compressed data directly.
Take advantage of fancy CPU features.
Avoid expensive row mode exchange operators.

20. Supported Operators
Supported operators change by version, but nothing new in SQL Server 2017.
Supported operators:
columnstore scan
hash match
compute scalar
sort
concatenation
top sort
filter
window aggregates

21. Watch out for Batch Mode Sorts
You should generally be happy to see batch mode operators except for batch mode sorts in some scenarios.
Microsoft’s implementation of batch mode sorts arguably isn’t complete yet and can lead to performance problems.
TF 9347 disables them.

22. Stay Current on CUs
Microsoft has released many important bug fixes related to Columnstore since 2016 SP1 base.
Don’t stay on 2016 SP1 base!

23. Relevant KBs KB 3210747 KB 4013118 KB 4019718 KB 4046858 KB 3208460
VSTS KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB KB

24. Demos 3

25. The Four Rules Take Advantage of Columnstore Features
Define and Maintain your Table
Get Batch Mode
Avoid Some Query Patterns

26. Some Queries Really Need NCIs
String aggregation doesn’t work well with CCIs until SQL Server 2017.
Not all joins are eligible for hash join.
Recursive queries are not a good match for CCIs.

27. Ruinous Row Goals
Think how a query plan might change if you add TOP 1 to it. Blocking operators, such as many of those eligible for batch mode, become less attractive.
Arguably CCIs are incompatible with most row goal optimizations.

28. Demos 4

29. The Four Rules Take Advantage of Columnstore Features
Define and Maintain your Table
Get Batch Mode
Avoid Some Query Patterns

30. Resources Columnstore indexes - Query performance
Niko Neugebauer’s blog
Row Goal Series by Paul White
CCIs And Recursive CTEs by Erik Darling
Aggregate Pushdown Limitations

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