Limitations and later enhancements

Without a doubt, the main limitation of the original release of Hekaton, SQL Server 2014, was that tables couldn’t be changed after being created: a new table with the required changes would have to be created instead. This was the case for any change you wanted to make to a table, such as adding a new column or index or changing the bucket count of a hash index. Creating a new table would require several other operations as well, such as copying its data to another location, dropping the table, creating the new table with the needed changes, and copying the data back, which would require some downtime for a production application. This limitation was probably the biggest challenge for deployed applications, which, of course, demanded serious thinking and architecture design to avoid or minimize changes once the required memory-optimized tables were in production.

In addition, dropping and creating a table would usually imply some other...