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 ...

Figure 1. Execution plan of a server query. As you can see in the above execution plan, SQL Server has highlighted a missing index that it thinks would help our query improve.

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.