Administrators and analysts often struggle with the storage and maintenance of reporting and analytics data. Traditional rowstore tables do not scale well when data is measured in billions of rows.

Columnstore indexes provide a speedy and convenient way to store OLAP data within SQL Server. Compression allows the data to be much smaller than other storage methods, allowing for faster reads. Column metadata provides the tools needed for SQL Server to be able to service queries over massive data sets quickly and efficiently.

The basics of columnstore indexes allow an administrator to improve the performance of analytics, but there is much more to learn! Understanding the internals of columnstore indexes allows querying to be even more efficient.

Columnstore indexes have evolved greatly since their introduction in SQL Server 2012. This presentation explores this feature in SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server 2019 and how its newest features can turbo-charge your analytics workloads!