Optimizing Columnar Storage for Measures

First of all I have to thank Marco Russo for his blog post on Optimizing High Cardinality Columns in Vertipaq and also his great session at SQL PASS Rally Nordic in Stockholm last year which taught me a lot about columnar storage in general. I highly recommend everyone to read the two mentioned resources before continuing here. Most of the ideas presented in this post are based on these concepts and require at least basic knowledge in columnar storage.