Paper Review: Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine

Title and Author of Paper Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine, Diaconu et al. Summary Database design has traditionally revolved around efficient access to disk. However, recent memory prices make it feasible to keep the majority (or entirety) of a database in main-memory. A main-memory design requires a few adjustments to maximize concurrency, handle transactions, and recover after failure. This paper describes such a design in relation to the development of Hekaton — an extension to Microsoft’s SQL Server. With Hekaton, if the user specifies that a table is “memory-optimized”, this triggers SQL Server to store that table entirely in memory, allowing Hekaton to optimize the table with its in-memory database engine. ...

May 27, 2016 · 3 min · Kevin Sookocheff