With growing memory sizes and memory prices dropping by a factor of 10 every 5 years, data having a "primary home" in memory is now a reality. Main-memory databases eschew many of the traditional architectural pillars of relational database systems that optimized for disk-resident data. The result of these memory-optimized designs are systems that feature several innovative approaches to fundamental issues (e.g., concurrency control, query processing) that achieve orders of magnitude performance improvements over traditional designs.

This monograph provides an overview of recent...