Hugo Kornelis joins a pair of technologies:
Time for the next part in my series on storage structures. The previous parts covered on-disk rowstore, columnstore indexes, and memory-optimized storage. In this part, I will look at the combination of the latter two: memory-optimized columnstore indexes.
Memory-optimized columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2016. I’ve seen some slick Microsoft marketing sessions in that time that were big on “real-time operational analytics”. A new trend where analytical processing would no longer be done on a stale copy of the data in a separate data warehouse, but directly on the OLTP database. Reports would always be fully current, there would be no more need for an ETL pipeline, and due to the combination of memory-optimized for OLTP workloads and columnstore for analytical processing, everything would always be fast. In theory.
Yeah, this one kinda fizzled out quickly. It was in line with the HTAP craze from about the same time period. And Hugo shows in this post part of why very few companies ever adopted it.