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Understanding HTAP

James Serra explains what Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing means:

HTAP is used to describe the capability of a single database that can perform both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) for the purpose of real-time operational intelligence processing.  The term was created by Gartner in 2014.

In the SQL Server world you can think of it as: In-memory analytics (columnstore) + in-memory OLTP = real-time operational analytics.  Microsoft supports this in SQL Server 2016 (see SQL Server 2016 real-time operational analytics).

I’m not completely sold on HTAP yet, particularly once you get to high-scale OLTP systems doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.  That said, there’s always more and more pressure to get data available for analytics faster and faster.