Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Columnstore

Filtered Indexes

Published 2016-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little explains the two types of filtered indexes:

These two filtered indexes are very different – and the SQL Server optimizer can use them very differently!

While classic filtered nonclustered rowstore indexes must reliably “cover” parts of the query to be used to the optimizer, filtered nonclustered columnstore indexes may be combined with other indexes to produce a plan returning a larger range of data.

This sounds a little weird. I’ll show you what I mean using the WideWorldImporters database.

Kendra exposes an interesting difference in the two types of index and a case where filtered indexes simply fail  (though that’s not a situation you want to be in anyhow!).

Comments closed

CISL 1.4.0

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer has released the latest version of his Columnstore Index Scripts Library:

Another happy release of the CISL (Columnstore Indexes Script Library) is live – this time it is 1.4.0!

This release is focusing on the addition of the Extended Events, so that a user of CISL can easily set up the events for each of the SQL Server (2012,2014,2016) or Azure SQL Database versions.

This is an open source library which I recommend if you deal with columnstore indexes in any fashion.

Comments closed

Memory-Optimized Columnstore

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer clears the air regarding memory-optimized columnstore tables:

I would like to dedicate this blog post to the Memory-Optimised (also known and LOVED as Hekaton) Columnstore Indexes and their limitations in SQL Server 2016.
Disclaimer: the Memory-Optimised Technology is the ground-breaking development, which will be truly appreciated only in the next couple of years, and it has its incredible use cases (and maybe I will be blogging more about this space in the next couple of months), but people needs to understand that mapping InMemory Columnstore Indexes to disk-based Columnstore Indexes 1:1 is a very wrong idea, and that because InMemory technology is significantly younger and less stable than Columnstore Indexes – there are some very significant hidden cornerstones.

It’s important to read this post as “this is not yet a fully-mature product” rather than “this will always be worse.”  But it’s just as important to understand the limitations of the product and not think you’re getting something that you aren’t.

Comments closed

Minimal Logging With Columnstore

Published 2016-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer continues his columnstore series by looking at columnstore insert logging in SQL Server 2016 versus 2014:

Ladies and gentlemen! That’s quite a difference to SQL Server 2014!
We better check the total length of the transaction log to see the final result: 384.032 bytes! Ok, that is significantly more than for the rowstore heap table for sure, but what about the comparison to the SQL Server 2014 ? Did this minimal logging bring any improvement ?
Well … 🙂
In SQL Server 2014 we had 1.255.224 bytes spent on the transaction log – meaning over 1.2 MB, meaning around 3 times more, for the Delta-Store insertion! For such a simple table, this is a huge improvement, but let’s take a look at the total length of the transaction log entries in both environments (SQL Server 2014 & SQL Server 2016)

This is worth a careful read.  If you’ve spent time working with 2014 clustered columnstore indexes, there are a few changes which might affect you.  The most interesting thing for me was that the deltastore is no longer page compressed.

Comments closed

Nonclustered Columnstore Indexes On Indexed Views

Published 2016-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer notes that non-clustered columnstore indexes can now sit on top of indexed views, as of SQL Server 2016:

From the perspective of the disk access, this is where you will definitely win at least a couple of times with the amount of the disk access while processing the information, amount of memory that you will need to store and process (think hashing and sorting for the late materialisation phases), and you will pay less for the occupied storage.

Another noticeable thing was that the memory grants for the Indexed Views query was smaller compared to the query that was processing the original columnstore table FactOnlineSales.

Clustered indexes are currently not available as an option; we’ll see if that changes in the next version of SQL Server.

Comments closed

Columnstore Improvements

Published 2016-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Warner Chaves discusses improvements in columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2016:

SQL Server first introduced Columnar Storage with the SQL 2012 Enterprise release. In this release, Columnstores were read-only indexes, so it required to drop the index, load the table or partition and then rebuild the index to refresh it with the latest data.

SQL Server 2014 upgraded Columnstores with full read-write capabilities, allowing the Columnstore to become the ‘clustered’ index for the table and hold all the data instead of just being one more index on top of row-organized data. 2014 also introduced many improvements to batch operations so more pieces of an execution plan could take advantage of this faster processing mode.

Read on to see changes in 2016.

Comments closed

CISL 1.3.1

Published 2016-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer has released the newest version of his columnstore index library:

Here is the small description of what is new in this release:

  • The database snapshots (.dacpac) for all platforms are now included in the Releases\DacPacs.

  • Includes new Powershell functions for installing and removing CISL from the Instances:

    • Install-CISL.ps1 will allow you to install the CISL at multiple databases of a SQ Server Instance (or Azure SQLDB).
    • Remove-CISL.ps1 will allow you to remove the CISL from the multiple databases of a SQL Server Instance (or Azure SQLDB).

  • Support for the different collation is included.

  • Includes information on all recent SQL Server updates.

  • Included support of the new Columnstore Indexes Trace Flags in SQL Server 2016.

  • Basic Unit Tests (based on t-sqlt) are included for SQL Server 2012 & SQL Server 2014, guaranteeing the quality of the released code.

  • A good number of bug fixes.

  • Further parameter enhancements for the existing functions.

Sounds like there’s a lot packed into this release.

Comments closed

New Columnstore Trace Flags

Published 2016-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer looks at a few trace flags which modify columnstore index behavior:

Starting with SQL Server 2016, if you have enough RAM and suffering from the TempDB Spills that do have a significant impact on your workload, then you can enable the Trace Flag 9389 that will enable Batch Mode Iterators to request additional memory for the work and thus avoiding producing additional unnecessary I/O.

I am glad that Microsoft has created this functionality and especially that at the current release, it is hidden behind this track, and so Microsoft can learn from the applications before enabling it by default, hopefully in the next major release of SQL Server.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here.  Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

CISL 1.3.0

Published 2016-07-25 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer has released version 1.3.0 of his Columstore script library:

I am extremely proud to share with everyone the news that the long-awaited and quite overdue release of the CISL – Columnstore Indexes Scripts Library is finally public – the 1.3.0 version. The most important part of this release is the support of the SQL Server 2016 & Azure SQLDatabase – all 3 scenarios (Nonclustered Columnstore, Disk-based Clustered Columnstore & the Memory-Optimised Clustered Columnstore Indexes) are included.
You will be able to explore all the important new architecture objects, such as Deleted Buffer & Deleted Table, plus the scripts for every version supports the new output results, even though there were no In-Memory tables in SQL Server 2012 for example.

If you use columnstore indexes, check this out.

Comments closed

Parallel Loading Columnstore Indexes

Published 2016-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Sunil Agarwal shows how to bulk load with parallelism into a clustered columnstore index from a staging table:

SQL Server 2016 requires following conditions to be met for parallel insert on CCI

  • Must specify TABLOCK
  • No NCI on the clustered columnstore index
  • No identity column
  • Database compatibility is set to 130

While these restrictions are enforced in SQL Server 2016 but they represent important scenarios. We are looking into relaxing these in subsequent releases. Another interesting point is that you can also load into ‘rowstore HEAP’ in parallel as well.

The restriction I’d most like to see reduced would be the “no non-clustered indexes” part.  The rest seem forgivable for most clustered columnstore setups (i.e., fact tables).

Comments closed