Sunil Agarwal has a couple of posts explaining columnstore indexes. First, how columnstore indexes differ from classic B-tree indexes:
Index Fragmentation: For rowstore based indexes, it is considered fragmented if (a) the physical order of pages in out of sync with the index-key order. (b) the data pages (clustered index) or index pages (for nonclustered index) are partially filled. A fragmented index will lead to significantly higher physical IOs and can potentially put more pressure on memory which can ultimately slowdown queries. Most organizations run a periodic index maintenance job to defragment indexes. For details, please refer to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189858.aspx#Fragmentation best practices on how to maintain btree indexes. For columnstore index, an index fragmentation is considered fragmented if (a) there are 10% or more rows marked as deleted in a compressed rowgroup (b) one or more smaller compressed rowgroups can be combined to create a larger compressed rowgroup such that the resultant compressed rowgroup has less than or equal to 1 million rows. Note, if a compressed rowgroup has less than 1 million rows due to dictionary size, it is not considered fragmented because there is nothing that can be done to increase its size. Also recall that a columnstore index consists of zero or more delta rowgroups as shown the in the picture below.
Also, clustered and non-clustered columnstores:
SQL Server 2016 provides two flavors of columnstore index; clustered (CCI) and nonclustered (NCCI) columnstore index. As shown in the simplified picture below, both indexes are organized as columns but NCCI is created on an existing rowstore table as shown on the right side in the picture below while a table with CCI does not have a rowstore table. Both tables can have one or more btree nonclustered indexes.
If you haven’t looked at columnstore indexes yet, 2016 is a great time to start.