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Tips for Optimizing Columnstore Indexes

Ed Pollack continues a series on columnstore indexes:

This is worth a second mention: Avoid updates at all costs! Columnstore indexes do not treat updates efficiently. Sometimes they will perform well, especially against smaller tables, but against a large columnstore index, updates can be extremely expensive.

If data must be updated, structure it as a single delete operation followed by a single insert operation. This will take far less time to execute, cause less contention, and consume far fewer system resources.

Read on for several more tips along these lines.