At SQLbits last month, I presented a new session: Cool Story, Bro – The DBAreactions Guide to SQL Server 2014. I wanted to have some fun while educating folks about the surprise gotchas of the newest features.
Here’s the In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton) section of the session:
Our sp_Blitz® has long warned you if Hekaton is in use, and its Hekaton detail page shows some of the limitations.
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Excellent presentation with the GIF images. Totally enjoyed and learned quite bit of information of Hekaton.
Great video on Hekaton. I didn’t realize there were that many gotchas. Sounds like Hekaton is cousin to Megatron if you ask me.
Pure awesomeness (presentation, not in-memory feature).
Obviously Hakaton needs to improve and hopefully next iteration will be more Developer/DBA friendly. Until then, it will be last feature to consider.
At first I thought – woo hoo! That looks like it could solve some of our big data problems, but given our SQL database is a touch over 300GB and we don’t have an unlimited supply of memory – I think we might avoid this one, at least for now. I think read only secondaries might be our solution for now …
I’m trying to understand why someone thought a transaction that never stops would be appealing.
Great stuff, Brent. I still find it astounding that they anvilled such a poor, limited, unhelpful feature into the product, like you said at SQL Bits, while totally ignoring the genuinely good parts of the product like Reporting Services. Makes you wonder who calls the shots!
In these days of ginormo and inexpensive SSDs then need for such a feature is greatly diminished anyway.
I saw the same thing with the PDW V1 release. Product was not mature. It was like a beta release. Same thing with Hekaton in memory OLTP. I have the impression that Microsoft does it to be available on the market with this technology because there competitors also have something similar even if the product isn’t usable.
“Bullets in the head of replication” – the pain never goes does it?
In fact I can see Hekaton being the “modern” equivalent of SQL replication 2000 –> 2008 R2. Pain;frustration; a glimmer of hope, then more pain.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry! I think I did a bit of both as you went through the “feature set” for Hekaton. Definitely worth the time to watch this video — more, please!
Good thing this is an Enterprise only feature at 7 grand a core! That means I’ll probably never have to have that awkward conversation with management that goes “I’m sorry, you can’t actually do that in the database”
Loved the presentation though!
I consider myself one of those “Senior database administrators who are trying to solve very specific pain points and they know what they’re doing”
But even in 2018, I still can’t pull the trigger on in-memory TVPs which is supposed to be kind of a gateway feature to the rest of Hekaton. 🙁
I agree, I consider you that too, and that says a lot.
I mean it says a lot that you can’t use in-memory TVPs yet.
It doesn’t say a lot that I consider you a senior DBA. You’re Canadian. You just kind of win these kinds of accolades by default.
I am flabbergasted. I have gone from “That sounds like an awesome feature!” to “WHY WHY WHY!!” IN 17:39.
Awesome!
A useful refresher \ summary, and very enjoyable viewing.
Thank you for taking the time to put this together Brent.
My pleasure!