Press "Enter" to skip to content

Clustered Columnstore Index Load With SSIS

Koen Verbeeck looks at loading a clustered columnstore index using SSIS:

I stumbled upon this MSDN blog post: SQL Server 2016 SSIS Data Flow Buffer Auto Sizing capability benefits data loading on Clustered Columnstore tables (catchy title). It explains how you can set the buffer properties of the data flow to try to insert data directly into compressed row groups instead of in the delta store. They fail to achieve this using SSIS 2014 and then they explain how using the new AutoAdjustBufferSize property of SSIS 2016 works miracles and everything is loaded directly into compressed row groups. Hint: you want to avoid loading data into the delta store, as it is row storage and you need to wait for the  tuple mover to load the data to the CCI in the background.

However, it’s still possible to achieve the same using SSIS 2014 (or earlier). Niko Neugebauer (blog |twitter) shows this in his post Clustered Columnstore Indexes – part 51 (“SSIS, DataFlow & Max Buffer Memory”). It still depends on the estimated row size, but using these settings you should get better results:

This advice is a bit different from loading standard rowstore-based tables, but serves to pack as many rows into each columnstore row group as possible.