David DeWitt Keynote at #SQLPASS #Summit13

Welcome to the live blog! Have some resources to start:

I’m taking a page out of Brent Ozar’s book (er, blog)…I’m not going to try to live blog the DeWitt session. There’s too much. Take a look at Brent’s blog, and come back here later for a few notes that strike me!

Hekaton: Why, What, and How

David DeWitt and Rimma Nehme, Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab (graysystemslab.com)  This slide deck will be posted.

Hekaton is available as part of SQL Server 2014 CTP2…it’s an “OLTP rocket ship!”   This is “in memory OLTP”. “Why can’t we just pin all tables in memory?” There are limiting problems with this, including latches for shared data structures, more.

Hekaton is different – it uses lock-free data structures (meaning, no latches). Locking is no longer the concurrency control mechanism; instead it’s versions with timestamps and optimistic currency control.  And finally, instead of interpreting queries, Hekaton will compile them into DLLs.