You can read about columnstore indexes here (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/transforming-your-data-in-azure-sql-database-to-columnstore-format/). I won’t rehash the material but high level, these index types are optimized for analytical queries and high compression of data (up to 100x). This format is perfect for the large data sets that can be efficiently compressed using this format and analytical queries with complex calculations that use subset of the table columns.

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