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Columnstore Query Patterns

Niko Neugebauer gives a couple hints on how to make columnstore queries as fast as possible:

On my VM with 4 cores it takes 33 seconds to execute this query on SQL Server 2016 with Service Pack 1, while it burns almost 48 seconds of the CPU Time.
The relevant part of the execution plan can be found below, showing so many performance problems that this query is suffering, such as INNER LOOP JOIN, INDEX SPOOL, besides even worse part that is actually hidden and is identifiable only once you open the properties of any of the lower tree (left side of the LOOP JOIN), seeing that it all runs with the Row Execution Mode actually.

To show you the problem, on the left side you will find the properties of the sort iterator that is to be found in the lower (left) part of the LOOP Join that was executed around 770.000 times in the Row Execution Mode, effectively taking any chances away from this query to be executed in a fast way. One might argue that it might that it might be more effective to do the loop part in Row Mode, but given that we are sorting around 3.1 Million Rows there – for me there is no doubt that it would be faster to do it within a Batch Execution Mode. Consulting the last sort iterator in the execution plan (TOP N SORT), you will find that it is running with the help of the Batch Execution Mode, even though it is processing around 770.000 rows.

There’s some valuable information here.