Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine

Hekaton is a new database engine optimized for memory resident data and OLTP workloads. Hekaton is fully integrated into SQL Server; it is not a separate system. To take advantage of Hekaton, a user simply declares a table memory optimized. Hekaton tables are fully transactional and durable and accessed using T-SQL in the same way as regular SQL Server tables. A query can reference both Hekaton tables and regular tables and a transaction can update data in both types of tables. T-SQL stored procedures that reference only Hekaton tables can be compiled into machine code for further performance improvements. The engine is designed for high con-currency. To achieve this it uses only latch-free data structures and a new optimistic, multiversion concurrency control technique. This paper gives an overview of the design of the Hekaton engine and reports some experimental results.