New Course: “SQL Server 2012: Nonclustered Columnstore Indexes”

Yesterday Pluralsight published my new course, “SQL Server 2012: Nonclustered Columnstore Indexes”. The intent behind this course was to provide a fast ramp-up on the aspects of this feature that you should consider when looking at whether or not this is a viable option for your SQL Server relational data warehouse workloads.  The course covers […]

Exploring Columnstore Index Batch Sizes

In this blog post we’ll explore columnstore index batch execution mode limits.  I’m using SQL Server 2012 Developer Edition, version 11.0.3349 (SP1, CU3). To start off with, I’ll create a table that uses six different supported nonclustered columnstore index data types: I’ll populate this table with 1,048,576 rows, all using the same value for each […]

Which LOB pages are associated with a specific columnstore segment?

Chalk this post up as an “exploratory” mission based on the following question… How do I track which LOB pages are associated with a specific columnstore index segment? Jonathan Kehayias and I discussed this the other day and hashed out a few options for tracking this. To illustrate this topic and keep it at a […]

Columnstore Segment Population Skew

My last post about nonclustered Columnstore indexes was written back on February 25th, 2012 (Exploring Columnstore Index Metadata, Segment Distribution and Elimination Behaviors).  Amazed by how quickly time passes. Anyhow, this is a quick post on segment population skew based on parallel nonclustered Columnstore index creations. I’ll use the same 123,695,104 row FactInternetSales table I […]

Exploring Columnstore Index Metadata, Segment Distribution and Elimination Behaviors

I was interested in exploring various questions about columnstore indexing this morning – and I realized I should probably blog about what I observed.  This truly was just an exploration and not a formal test (call it semi-structured fiddling).  Also, some of my “questions” were really just confirmations.  While I believe what I read, I […]

Row and batch execution modes and columnstore indexes

This post covers examples from Denali  SQL Server 2012 CTP3, version 11.0.1440. In my last post I hinted towards some interesting findings regarding parallelism and columnstore indexes.  I’ll talk about what I observed in this post. Just as a quick level-set, columnstore indexing provides two new areas of functionality within SQL Server 2012 that can potentially […]

The case of the columnstore index and the memory grant

This post covers examples from Denali CTP3, version 11.0.1440.   I was working with Denali’s columnstore index feature this last week and was testing it on a virtual machine when I encountered the following error message when trying to create a new index: The statement has been terminated. Msg 8657, Level 17, State 5, Line 2 […]