Hekaton SQL Server mystery revealed!

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As some of you might remember, I published this https://sqlservice.se/sv/start/blogg/sql-server-mystery-hekaton-tables-and-hekaton-procedures.aspx blogpost back in June, when I stumbled upon a mysterious reference inside SQL Server to something called Hekaton.

Well, it is no longer a mystery, as Microsoft has just announced (More details here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2012/11/08/breakthrough-performance-with-in-memory-technologies.aspx) the In Memory technology Hekaton to be released in the next major version of SQL Server. There is not a lot of public information available yet apart from that blogpost, but from what I have seen and heard so far, it seems very exiting, and we could be standing on the edge of the next big leap in database technology.

The key points to take away from now is

– Hekaton is for high voulme OLTP solutions

– It is built in to the SQL Server product, and accessed using standard T-SQL, menaning it is (almost) transparent to your applications

– Hekaton tables are all in memory, but you can choose to persist the data

– Persistence is done in an optimized way (sequential data write) and indexes are never persisted

– Hekaton stored procedures are T-SQL procedures that are compiled into native code to run very much faster

– Scale Up is provided by taking away all locking and latching. ACID is provided trough versioning

– This is just the beginning, more cool improvements to Hekaton are already in the making !!

We can hope for a public CTP in the summer of 2013, and a RTM during 2014. But as usual, there are no guarantees that those dates will hold in the end.