SQL Server 2014 from Microsoft was supposed to introduce some path breaking technical stuff on the relational database front and it promises to live up to its hype in terms of a new feature – Hekaton!! So what is Hekaton?? To all of those to whom this seems like a fancy jargon derived from some ancient Mediterranean language, here are some of the interesting facts about this feature!!
- It is an In-Memory OLTP Database Engine that supports tables that resides in the memory, which means there are no disk reads/writes like traditional tables inside the OLTP databases hosted on the database engine
- This would facilitate the support of latch-free, lock-free databases (meaning no serious database locking issues!! J) containing memory-optimized tables which are would support blistering read/write performance and also are durable and transactional.
- Supports high level of concurrency and transactional handling
- Stored procedures can be compiled into native code which can access the tables that reside in the memory
- The memory optimized tables however do not support storing BLOBS
- Performance improvements that would be in the region of 5X-20X in database application operations!
- Needs 64 bit hardware architecture with 64 bit Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2014
- Supports mainly two index types: hash indexes and range indexes
So all those of you whose curiosity has been kindled by this technology, get your hands dirty by trying the CTP version of 2014 which is available for download at Download SQL Server 2014 CTP1.
To learn more about Hekaton and how it could dramatically boost the performances of database applications, please read the following links.