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LOB On Memory-Optimized Tables

Dmitri Korotkevitch digs into LOB data when you build a memory-optimized table:

There is also considerable overhead in terms of memory usage. Every non-empty off-row value adds 50+ bytes of the overhead regardless of its size. Those 50+ bytes consist of three artificial ID values (in-row, off-row in data row and leaf-level of the range index) and off-row data row structure. It is even larger in case of LOB columns where data is stored in LOB Page Allocator.

One of the key points to remember that decision which columns go off-row is made based on the table schema. This is very different from on-disk tables, where such decision is made on per-row basis and depends on the data row size. With on-disk tables, data is stored in row when it fits on the data page.

In-Memory OLTP works in the different way. (Max) columns are always stored off-row. For other columns, if the data row size in the table definition can exceed 8,060 bytes, SQL Server pushes largest variable-length column(s) off-row. Again, it does not depend on amount of the data you store there.

This is a great article getting into the internals of how memory-optimized tables work in SQL Server 2016, as well as a solid reason to avoid LOB types and and very large VARCHAR values on memory-optimized tables if you can.  Absolutely worth a read.