What Prevents Columnstore Row Group Merge

Niko Neugebauer shows two major scenarios in which the Row Group Merge operator will not work as expected, leaving you with an unexpectedly large number of row groups:

Let’s take a look at the most evil and uncorrectable pressure within SQL Server for the Columnstore Indexes – the Dictionary Pressure. For any final user without a bit of the internal knowledge of the Row Group sizes, Dictionaries & Pressures, it is always a huge surprise to find out that they can’t have those perfectly sized Row Groups with 1.048.576 rows.

Let us set up a table producing a good Dictionary Pressure and load 1.1 Million Rows into it, expecting to get just 2 Row Groups, while perfectly being aware that the result shall be quite different:

Niko’s dictionary pressure example is a good reason not to include textual columns on columnstore indexes.