Summary

This chapter covered in-memory OLTP, originally known as Hekaton, which without a doubt was the most important new feature of SQL Server 2014. The Hekaton OLTP database engine is a response to a new design and architectural approach looking to achieve the most benefit of the new hardware available today. Although optimization for main memory access is its main feature and is even part of its name, Hekaton’s performance improvement is also complemented by other major architecture areas, such as compiling procedures to native code, as well as latches and lock elimination.

This chapter covered the Hekaton architecture and its main components – memory-optimized tables, hash, and range indexes, and natively compiled stored procedures were explained in great detail. Although Hekaton had several limitations in its first release in SQL Server 2014, multiple limitations have been lifted after four new releases, including SQL Server 2022.

xVelocity memory-optimized...