Chapter 10: In-Memory OLTP – Why and How to Use it

Performance is crucial for every system's success and it's the same for SQL Server. However, as data contention grows all over the world, the traditional method of continuous algorithm tuning and improving from version to version becomes an insufficient approach. Since 2010, Microsoft has been working on a completely new approach to data processing called Hekaton. The first version was present on SQL Server 2014 as the In-Memory OnLine Transactional Processing (OLTP) feature. It offers new frontiers for developers and administrators to design and maintain speedy applications and also break many limits of traditional disk-based data processing.

In this chapter, we will have a top-level overview of how the In-Memory OLTP architecture works and the requirements for its successful implementation. We will also look at how to create in-memory tables and how to enhance their performance with natively compiled...