Is there any bulk-load operation(s) occurring in the database?

not sure what you're trying to do, but have you tried the clustered columnstore feature instead?

thanks, so this sounds like a soft restriction rather than hard restriction based on your experience. doesn't mean i want to do something not officially supported by MS but...

For those who are interested, this is the connect item submitted to MS

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/808566/poor-query-plan-generated-for-sql-server-2014-clustered-columnstore-index

Their feedback was to lower the cost threshold for parallelism but this did not work for...

yep, therefore service broker looks promising so far

anyone else with any other ideas?

service broker is also a possibility although there are some concerns (ie. monitoring, initial synchronization, if data becomes out of sync over time, etc) but definitely worth investigating

i guess, to...