Memory-optimized tables

The following quote is from the SQL Server 2014 documentation:

"SQL Server In-Memory OLTP helps improve performance of OLTP applications through efficient, memory-optimized data access, native compilation of business logic, and lock- and latch free algorithms. The In-Memory OLTP feature includes memory-optimized tables and table types, as well as native compilation of Transact-SQL stored procedures for efficient access to these tables."

Much like traditional tables, memory-optimized tables offer fully durable transactions and meet ACID (Atomic Consistent Independent and Durable) by default and are designed to help databases that require really fast performance.

Much like the name suggests, memory-optimized tables are stored in the main memory (RAM) and therefore not on the hard disk. In fact, internally, SQL Server does keep a second copy on disk but this is for durability purposes and is only read from the hard disk during database recovery. A set of checkpoint files...