Eight Reasons to Use Microsoft SQL Server 2014’s In-Memory Technology

by Darryl K. Taft

SQL Server 2014’s in-memory technologies are specifically tuned for each workload—transaction processing, data warehousing, or analytics and business intelligence. For example, customers such as CJ E&M are achieving 35x transaction performance gains with in-memory OLTP; customers like bwin are achieving over 340x performance gains for query and reporting performance as well as 17x for transactional performance.

SQL Server 2014’s in-memory OLTP technology significantly increases performance for mission-critical applications while minimizing additional cost by only requiring the hot tables of the database to be put in memory versus the entire database. When these hot tables are memory-optimized, they automatically transform into a new data structure that eliminates locking and latching. Customers can also recompile stored procedures natively in machine code for additional performance benefits.

First introduced in SQL Server 2012, in-memory columnstore is now updateable, enabling read and writes to the data warehouse while benefiting from ultra-fast query speeds and higher data compression rates. With updateable in-memory columnstore, customers are seeing 100x performance gains. The in-memory columnstore has resulted in world record performance and price/performance. Customers such as NASDAQ (see case study here) are using in-memory columnstore to save time and money on data management, improve query performance, and help to facilitate long-term goals.

Microsoft offers customers flexibility to put a subset of their data in-memory and provides tools to help determine what data will benefit the most from running in-memory. This means customers can optimize existing resources and achieve significant performance gains on existing hardware rather than requiring a hardware refresh or expensive add-ons. In addition, customers won’t need to rewrite existing SQL Server applications or learn new skills to take advantage of in-memory technology.

Many customers have already deployed Microsoft’s in-memory technologies and have seen significant performance gains. Some examples include Progressive Insurance, EdgeNet, SBI Liquidity Market, TPP, CJ E&M, Stein Mart and PROS.

Microsoft just released SQL Server Migration Assistant tool (SSMA v6.0), a free tool to help customers move their existing Oracle databases to SQL Server 2014. This tool automates all aspects of an Oracle migration, with new features for moving Oracle tables into SQL Server 2014 in-memory tables, the ability to process 10,000 Oracle objects in a single migration, and increasing performance in database migration and report generation.

This means that customers can get in-memory technology working in minutes. Want to try the latest release? Do you need a lab sandbox to kick the tires? That is easy with Azure Virtual Machines. Simply provision the prebuilt SQL Server 2014 image off the Azure Image Gallery and get going in minutes.

SQL Server 2014 has new features that make it easier for customers to recover on-premises SQL Server databases using Microsoft Azure. The backup to Microsoft Azure capabilities in SQL Server 2014 offers customers a single, cost-effective backup strategy for secure off-site storage with encryption and compression.