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...