At lunch the last day of the conference one of the developers at my table said he had been sent specifically to see Mike Zwilling speak on "SQL Server 2014: In-Memory OLTP Architecture and Capabilities." His boss told him I don't care what else you go to, just go to that one. Then he saw it was at the same time as Crockford's main keynote. (The SQL Server and SharePoint tracks were sort of off in their own world). He said there was no way I was going to miss that. I said whoa, just try to keep your boss from finding out. "Too late," he said. "I talked to him on the phone this morning and already told him." This guy was young and obviously bright and enthusiastic so I don't imagine he is in too much hot water.

I did a session on Hekaton (the new 2012 in-memory OLTP session) at SQL Live in Vegas last month and I'm doing the same session at VS Live in DC this fall.

Hekaton is one of those features that won't be useful for everyone - but when it's useful, boy is it useful. As you saw, it's a way to specify certain tables for in-memory designation with a new in-memory engine that supports concurrency. It's designed for heavy OLTP applications with a high # of inserts in a day. You can get speed increases of a factor of 10 or more. Hopefully Mike mentioned in his session that there's a tool (AMR) you can download that will monitor your OLTP application and report on tables that are good candidates for Hekaton.