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Why So Few Columnstore Indexes Around?

Grant Fritchey has a bit of a rant about people not using Columnstore indexes as much as they should:

It was already common knowledge that columnstore indexes didn’t work for most of us.

Fact is, that’s not true. Now that we have clustered columnstore and non-clustered columnstore, you can go nuts. Most of your data access is through analytical channels? Awesome, use a clustered columnstore. Sometimes though, you need point lookups. Not a problem, add a nonclustered b-tree index to the clustered columnstore. Go here to learn more about Columnstore Indexes.

In short, today, we can completely orient our data storage with our principal data access. Yet, most people are not using these things at all.

One of my interview questions is about columnstore indexes. I’ve learned that I needed to preface it with “What’s the latest version of SQL Server you’ve worked with?” A lot of people answer 2012. Even among the people who use 2016, the normal answer is that they haven’t learned about columnstore yet. And that goes back to Grant’s learning gap: it’s not that hard to grab a book on SQL Server 2019, spin up a Docker container, and dive in. Or watch a course, spin up a Docker container, and follow along. Or read a blog post, spin up a Docker container, and…well, you get the idea.