What the Hekaton ?!?!

I was playing around some with SQL Server 2014 CTP2 this past weekend, just before the real release today, and noticed something odd when I was playing with the new in memory OLTP feature, named Hekaton.

While I was at SQL Saturday #262 in Boston things worked fine. Same goes for my being at the hotel and even at Boston Logan airport while I waited for my multi-hour delayed flight home.

It was only once I got on the plane that I found Hekaton wasn’t working correctly anymore.

I went nuts trying to figure it out what was going on and get it working. We started to land, so I quit trying until I got home. Then everything worked fine again, in fact it was working really well. I even got better performance from Hekaton than I did before. I dug in a little deeper and found out it was my internet connection making a difference. I just got a new insanely fast router (NetGear NightHawk AC1900) at home and coupled with my business grade high speed internet connection Hekaton was working really fast!

It was the only difference between everywhere that I had it working, and the plane, where I had one of the ones still in existence without internet connectivity.

Now, as a side note:  I was shocked and mildly amused when I heard about this a few weeks ago:

Did you know you can get Oracle to run in a Microsoft Azure environment.

No, it’s true! Here’s the link to verify that as of 3/12/14 you can do that! http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/oracle/

Considering the long time rivalry between Oracle and SQL Server I didn’t expect this at all. Then I started to put it all together.

Hekaton is using an Azure based Oracle instance to store the SQL OLTP data in ‘memory’!

It makes perfect sense! Oracle has always been said to be faster and better than SQL Server. Just ask any management level person working in the government sector or at a large business.

This has to be why it won’t work for all applications immediately and some ‘recode’ is required to make ‘applications more tolerant’ of the data in memory.

Sneaky, sneaky Microsoft. Slowly letting the enemy infiltrate the ranks to get better performance and boost market share with new ‘Hekaton’ features.

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Ok, I know this is a touchy subject to think about today. After all, it is April Fool’s day.

But it is the official release date for SQL Server 2014 and this just seems to be too big of a coincidence.

Chew on that for a bit.