At Stack Overflow, we have some tables using clustered columnstore indexes, and these work great for the majority of our workload. But we recently came across a situation where “perfect storms” — multiple processes all trying to delete from the same CCI — would overwhelm the CPU as they all went widely parallel and fought to complete their operation. Here’s what it looked like in SolarWinds® SQL Sentry®:
It looks bad. Click through to understand why and what Aaron & co did to prevent this issue. I typically have used queue tables on the other end of columnstore indexes: as a method for ensuring that we insert 1024*1024 rows at a time. This was particularly important in the 2016 days, as we had a problem in which trickle-loading a columnstore index would cause massive numbers of rowgroups with dozens of rows, though that issue was subsequently fixed.