ColumnStore Index - SQL 2012 New features

Summary:

The SQL Server 11.0 release (code named “Denali”) introduces a new data warehouse query acceleration feature based on a new type of index called the columnstore. This new index, combined with enhanced query processing features, improves data warehouse query performance by hundreds to thousands of times in some cases, and can routinely give a tenfold speedup for a broad range of decision support queries. This can allow end users to get more business value from their data through fast, interactive exploration. IT workers can reduce development costs and ETL times since columnstore indexes limit or eliminate the need to rely on pre-built aggregates, including user-defined summary tables, and indexed (materialized) views. Furthermore, columnstore indexes can greatly improve ROLAP performance, making ROLAP more attractive.

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Note: above content is copied from the White paper discussed in this post

How Reporting Services Works?

Here I’ve explained briefly on how Reporting service requests are handled through the components of SSRS architecture.

As shown in the diagram: Firstly, request will be received by Reporting server’s OS through Http.sys Driver, the driver will route the communication to reporting service’s Web service.  Http Listener will receive the request which will be re-routed by Http.sys.

Http Listener transfers the request to Security sub layer (SSL) for authentication.  Requestor is identified using 4 different authentication mechanisms like Kerberos, NTLM, Negotiate and basic authentication.

Each mechanism supports different approach. Once user has been authorized by SSL, user communication will be redirected to either Report Manager or Report Server which is hosted in RS web services (refer the exhibit). These two components will read the report definition, report details like parameter, building report query, and some of the activities which are listed below, etc., will be done with the help of Core Processing unit.

Activities of Core Processing component are:-

• Scheduling
• Subscription Management
• Report Processing

Upon completion of processing all SSRS components, Report output will be rendered on report viewer.

Hope this is helpful!