In a keynote at SQL PASS Summit, Microsoft announced it is bringing In-Memory online transaction processing (OLTP) to the next major release of SQL Server, code named Hekaton. Twitter lit up with chatter about it, and at our booth at PASS, Hekaton was the topic du jour.
Our quick take on Hekaton is that even in-memory databases have transaction logs that are on persistent storage. By utilizing ioMemory as the persistent storage for transaction logs, we accelerate transaction processing, as the logs are being written to constantly. It’s faster to recover an in-memory database as well, because the transaction logs have to be read quickly to recover a database fast. Finally, the backup speed of in-memory databases gets faster if the backups reside on ioMemory.
Hekaton is all about efficiency and performance, the same ideals that drive innovation at Fusion-io. We think Hekaton sounds promising. Here’s to database acceleration!
Here are a few tidbits about Hekaton from around the web:
“Hekaton is the Greek word for 100 times, and Microsoft says that’s the design goal for the peak performance improvements it’s expecting.” Doug Henschen, Informationweek
“Hekaton is currently in private technology preview with a small set of customers, which company officials are planning to expand to 100 before the end of this calendar year.” Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet
“The next version of SQL Server will feature the ability to host database tables or even entire databases within a server’s working memory.” Joab Jackson, Computerworld
“Data has emerged as the new currency of business.” Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, The Official Microsoft Blog
In a recent article in FX-MM, Steven Graves, CEO of McObject, reports on his experience with ioMemory and in-memory databases. Check out “Databases: Have your in-memory performance, and recoverability too.”
Posted by david ricketts 
