Niko Neugebauer looks at memory requirements for rebuilding and reorganizing columnstore indexes:
To spare all the Wows & how can’s, Microsoft was well aware of this problem and has delivered a solution with Cumulative Update 3 for SQL Server 2016 with Service Pack 1:
FIX: SQL Server 2016 consumes more memory when you reorganize a columnstore index, and here it is – a new trace flag 6404 (documented in the link and thus should be supported), that will allow you to lower the memory requirements for the ALTER INDEX … REORGANIZE command.
Let’s take it for the test, by once again running the setup workload for the FactOnlineSales_Reindex table and then executing the following command, enabling the Trace Flag 6404 and then reorganising our Clustered Columnstore Index:
This is a rather interesting post and once again makes me wish that clustered columnstore indexes could be rebuilt online.