Heckaton

New Microsoft SQL Server 2014 DBMS will have the "engine" which is built in by in-memory OLTP constructed on Heckaton technologies, new development of Microsoft Research.

Microsoft Heckaton is in-memory technology, however, different from other in-memory of data warehouses, such as Oracle TimesTen. The difference consists that in this case not all processing but only some chosen sections of data is transferred to RAM. In Microsoft laboratory use of Hekaton allowed to reach 50-fold reduction of time of transactions, and the first users who tested technology, noted performance improvement for 16%, representatives of corporation said.

Microsoft promises what in addition to performance improvement of transactions of SQL Server of 2014 will also allow to lower equipment costs as requirements to "iron", necessary for work of DBMS, will become more democratic regarding the computing power and the number of servers.

Heckaton works with data selectively, placing only the "hottest" (hot data) demanded and relevant for processing in RAM. Besides, a system saves integrity of transactions even in case of a system exit out of operation, placing them in a separate log.

One more feature of a system consists that Heckaton allows to reveal the most often used procedures and to compile them in machine code. The machine code is, as a rule, executed much quicker, than the code written in language of the top level, such as, for example, SQL.

Also Heckaton increases performance because does not block the data table for record of different processes when they address the same table at the same time. The conflict can arise only at data writing in the same line two processes at the same time. However, even separate lines are not blocked for updating in such cases as in Microsoft thought up how to part processes in similar cases in parallel.