Niko Neugebauer has a great knowledge dump regarding strings in columnstore indexes:
Having Strings in Fact tables is something that is quite normal, but to be honest, in the most cases – does not make a lot of sense, since we are trying to keep there the information that can be calculated and/or aggregated. Notice that I have written in the most cases and NOT in all cases, because there are some noticeable exceptions. Additionally if you are “feeding” SSAS Tabular with your table this might be much easier to do it directly (hey, there is a solution through the views for that, I was told :)).
In this blog post, I am focusing not on the exceptions but on the typical cases where its not the best option and so here is a basic solution I just wanted to present you an optimised structure, which contains a tinyint column referring to the new table with distinct data for the ShipMode.
The string experience with columnstore can be troublesome. It’s great for numeric values, but less great for strings.