Dmitry Pilugin shares some thoughts on the expansion of batch mode processing to rowstore tables:
The main advantages of Batch Mode are:
- Algorithms optimized for the multi-core modern CPUs;
- Better CPU cache utilization and increased memory throughput;
- Reduced number of CPU instructions per processed row.
All these features make Batch Mode much faster than Row Mode (typically an order of magnitude, 10x-100x times faster) for analytical queries with CS indexes. One major condition for Batch Mode is a presence of a CS index. If you don’t have a CS index on a table involved in a query, you won’t get Batch Mode.
However, some analytical queries may benefit from Batch Mode without a CS index, or CS cannot be created due to some limitations.
There are a few tricks that allow you to enable Batch Mode on a Rowstore table for example with a dummy filtered CS index (see this post from Itzik Ben-Gan), but SQL Server 2019 may use Batch Mode on Rowstore without any extra efforts from your side.
Dmitry dives into the debugger and teases out the specific circumstances which can help get a query considered for rowstore. If you want a deep dive into what’s currently available, this is your post.