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Clustered Columnstore Index Updates

Koen Verbeeck discusses what updates do to clustered columnstore indexes:

Turns out the majority of the rows belonged to the second scenario. Whoops. The initial run took a little over 20 hours. Not exactly rocket speed. The problem was that for each period, a large number of rows in the clustered columnstore index (CCI) had to be updated, just to set the range of the interval. Updates in a CCI are expensive, as they are split into inserts and deletes. Doing so many updates resulted in a heavily fragmented CCI and with possibly too many rows in the delta storage (which is row storage).

Read the whole thing.  Koen links to a Niko Neugebauer post, which you should also read.  After that, read my warning on trickle loading.  The major querying benefits you get from clustered columnstore indexes is great, but it does come at a cost when you aren’t simply inserting new rows.