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Columnstore Key Lookups are Bad News

Forrest McDaniel does not want to perform that key lookup:

I’ve read it repeatedly, columnstore key lookups are extra slow. The question of course, is why?

In my mental model, it makes sense. A normal key lookup adds about 3 reads.

While a columnstore lookup should add at least a read per column, since each column lives in its own segments.

But it turns out that it’s not a read per column, oh no. Columnstore indexes are amazing for large-scale aggregations and awful for individual lookups.