Niko Neugebauer concludes a series on in-memory OLTP:
Over the years, I have contributed with a reasonably big number of posts on the topic of In-Memory OLTP (aka Hekaton) and I did a couple of focused presentations on this wonderful feature as well. I love the idea, I love the path where the feature was going, and call me wrong* and overall I think that if the leadership team of Microsoft Data Platform understood the potential, it would have grown much bigger and more impactful.
Today I am writing the last post on Hekaton, for the foreseeable future. For me its journey has come to an end. The Odyssey has ended. With the arrival of SQL Server 2025, we have finally received a functionality of removing the In-Memory Filegroup from the database. The introduction of this functionality is closing the loop after 11 years since Hekaton introduction.
I agree with Niko. The promise was considerable but the actual implementation was frustrating, especially if you had cross-database queries. At the time this feature came out, the company I worked for could have made great use of it, except that a majority of queries we had used replicated lookup data that existed in a separate database. As a result, we were able to make good use of memory-optimized temp tables for table-valued parameters, but not much else.