Is the Vertipaq engine in Power BI same as the one used by columnstore indexes in SQL Server?

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I have read this somewhere about the core technologies being the same in Power BI as well as the one used in MS SQL Server, but I am not able to find anything from Microsoft linking these two technologies. Do they use similar algorithms or did they start at the same place but evolved to be different now? If any of you have some relevant information regarding this, I would appreciate it. Thanks

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Andrey Nikolov On

They are similar with common origin, but different. Alberto Ferrari wrote one very good white paper on this subject - White paper: VertiPaq vs ColumnStore Comparison:

In SQL 2012 the xVelocity engine comes in two different flavors:

  • xVelocity in-memory analytics engine, also known as Vertipaq, is the in-memory engine that runs inside Analysis Services 2012 for Tabular models.
  • xVelocity memory optimized ColumnStore index, is the same technology implemented in the SQL Server engine, in the form of non-clustered columnar indexes

Power BI uses the one that is in Analysis Services.