First introduced in SQL Server 2012, columnstore indexes can give you major performance gains -- provided you have the right workloads. Here's how columnstore indexes work and what types of data work ...

SQL Server 2012 includes a lot of new and exciting features. One feature that has caught the imagination of many in the user community is the high-performance feature called Columnstore Indexes.

New for SQL Server 2016 is the ability to place a Columnstore Index on an In-Memory Table.

Non-clustered Columnstore Indexes are also getting some enhancements in SQL Server 2016. The most notable of these enhancements is the ability to be updated.

In SQL Server 2012, the columnstore indexes are non-clustered and cannot be updated other than by rebuilding the entire index. SQL Server 2014 introduces clustered columnstore indexes, which ...

SQL Server 2012’s ColumnStore Index stores data for columns you designate and then joins those database columns to give you a read-only, column-based index into the data (traditional indexes are ...

In the operational analytics department, the non-clustered variety of Columnstore indexes (NCCIs), introduced in SQL Server 2012, can now be built and rebuilt without taking the tables they index ...

Availability groups, columnstore indexes, memory optimized tables, snapshot isolation: the list goes on and on of features which can drastically speed up certain patterns of work.

While SQL Server 2008 was little more than a service-pack level upgrade, the 2012 version of Microsoft’s database has a boatload of new features and delivers solid performance improvements.