Microsoft has made the in-memory features for its Azure SQL Premium cloud database generally available. In-memory technology can dramatically speed processing for big data workloads, and the technology has become increasingly popular.
“In-memory technology helps optimize the performance of transactional (OLTP), analytics (OLAP), as well as mixed workloads (HTAP),” blogged Rohan Kumar, general manager of Microsoft’s Database Systems group. “These technologies allow you to achieve phenomenal performance with Azure SQL Database—75,000 transactions per second for order processing (11X [performance] gain) and reduced query execution time from 15 seconds to 0.26 (57X [performance gain]).” He also noted that the new in-memory capabilities do not carry an extra fee.
Several other vendors offer in-memory technology, notably SAP with its HANA platform.
