Last week we started the public preview of In-Memory OLTP and Real-Time Operational Analytics in Azure SQL Database.

With In-Memory OLTP in Azure SQL Database, you can achieve both faster performance for your business applications and scale to a larger number of users, while continuing to benefit from Azure DB scaling and availability guarantees. With In-Memory OLTP in SQL Server, customers such as Samsung, Dell and Progressive achieve up to 30x transactional performance gains.

Bringing this technology to the cloud means customers will be able to take advantage of in-memory OLTP in a fully managed database-as-a-service with 99.99% SLA. SQL Database also has built-in advisors to help customers get started quickly with in-memory OLTP to optimize performance.

With Real-Time Operational Analytics, you are able to use our in-memory columnstore on your disk-based operational data for real-time insights and 100x performance gains. Now you can use our in-memory columnstore in conjunction with in-memory OLTP for breakthrough transactional and analytics performance in the same database. This is a unique capability only provided by Microsoft in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2016.

Forrester Research recently named Microsoft a leader in The Forrester Wave™: In-Memory Database Platforms, Q3 2015. “Microsoft offers specialized in-memory databases for online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, presenting a viable option for Microsoft SQL Server customers.” According to this Forrester report, “Customers running Microsoft SQL Server should look at the in-memory option to improve their transactions and analytics; the upgrade is worth the effort.”

For more information and to get started, check out the In-Memory (preview) in Azure SQL Database documentation.