Evolving the architecture of SQL Server for modern hardware trends

The basic architecture of SQL Server, as well as other major database systems, goes back to a time when main memories were (very) small, data lived on disk, machines had a single (slow) processor, and OLTP was the only workload that mattered. This is not an optimal design for today's environment with large main memories, plenty of cores, and where transactional and analytical processing are equally important. To adapt to these trends and take advantage of the opportunities they offer SQL Server has added support for column store indexes and in-memory tables over the last two releases. The two features are aimed at dramatically improving performance on analytical and transactional workloads, respectively. This paper gives an overview of the design of the two features and the performance improvements they provide.