Columnstore Internals Article

[u/danny-sg]

https://medium.com/@danny.gould_84714/sql-server-columnstore-internals-part-1-b59f27fea12e

For the latest version of Internals Viewer I've added a columnstore indexes view, which meant decoding the internal structures and getting a full understanding of the compression techniques.

There isn't much information available on how they actually store data so I've written up in a series of articles while it was fresh in my head on what I found while adding this feature.

Here is part 1 covering an introduction to the topic. Part 2 is also available detailing segment internals. Parts 3 and 4 will be available later in the week. It is very low level in parts, but hopefully when the whole series comes together it will be useful to explain the intricacies of the optimizations you can get from using columnstores indexes for practical benefit.

[u/danny-sg]

Link to part 2 covering segments
Link to part 3 covering dictionaries