In-Memory Optimized Tables - Getting Started with SQL Server 2014 Administration - page 30

In-Memory Optimized Tables
In many past versions of SQL Server, the general strategy from Microsoft has seen
a great deal of improvement in the business intelligence stack. The database engine
has remained relatively stable over these previous releases. SQL Server 2014 has
seen a great new feature that has been introduced to help the DBA in the trenches.
The production DBAs, who look after and manage transactional database systems
supporting the day-to-day routine of trying to squeeze the last drop of efficiency out
of their servers, now have a great new feature to help improve performance in the
form of In-Memory Optimized tables .
During the pre-release of SQL Server 2014 this exciting new enhancement was called
Hekaton . Hekaton is an old Greek word meaning one hundred or one hundred
fold. Microsoft hopes that this new feature can improve performance and make
certain transactions execute up to a hundred times faster than they do on the current
platform. In this chapter, we will:
• Understand the system requirements of memory-optimized tables
• Consider how the new objects can work with virtualization
• Examine what you need to do to set up and create memory-optimized tables
Requirements
There are a number of requirements you need to satisfy in order to utilize In-
Memory Optimized tables. These are as follows:
• In-Memory Optimized tables require the Enterprise edition SQL Server 2014
(the Developer and Evaluation editions also have all the features of the
Enterprise edition but cannot be used in production environments)
• The SQL Server will need enough memory (RAM) to hold the data stored in
the In-Memory Optimized tables