In-memory OLTP architecture
One of the main strategic decisions made during the Hekaton project was to build a new database engine fully integrated into SQL Server instead of creating a new, separate product as other vendors did. This gave users several advantages, such as enabling existing applications to run without code changes, and not needing to buy and learn about a separate product. As mentioned earlier, Hekaton can provide a several orders of magnitude performance increase based on the following:
- Optimized tables and indexes for main memory data access: Hekaton tables and indexes are designed and optimized for memory. They are not stored as database pages, and they do not use a memory buffer pool either.
- T-SQL modules compiled to native code: Stored procedures can be optimized by the SQL Server query optimizer, like any regular stored procedure, and then compiled into highly efficient machine code. When this happens, trigger and scalar user-defined functions can...
