We are pleased to announce the general availability of Clustered and NonClustered Columnstore indexes for Standard databases in the S3 and above pricing tiers. These features will enable a number of new and valuable scenarios:
- Functional dev/test for columnstore based applications, without needing to pay for Premium tier databases for testing purposes. (Of course performance testing should always be done at the target performance configuration.)
- Deploying applications with columnstore-based storage which do not have the mission critical performance and availability requirements found in Premium tier database requirements.
- Application vendors can now develop an application which leverages columnstore functionality and deploy it on both Standard and Premium performance tiers.
Read about it in the Azure blog.