Microsoft is adding in-memory data processing technology to the next major release of its SQL Server database software, a move that will boost performance for some on-line transaction processing (OLTP) applications by a factor of 50.

Microsoft is also releasing SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1, the company said Wednesday at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) user group meeting in Seattle. And it's adding a new data processing engine called PolyBase to its Parallel Data Warehouse appliance to speed queries across relational data and non-relational Hadoop data.

Microsoft is developing the in-memory technology under the project code-name "Hekaton," said Ted Kummert, Microsoft's senior vice president, in a speech and product demonstration at the PASS event. "This thing is fast," he said, citing performance gains for some database tasks of up to 50 times.

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Software vendors have been racing to perfect their in-memory database technology, including SAP with its HANA software and Oracle with its Exalytics In-Memory Machine. In-memory technology is capable of processing and analyzing data much more quickly because it relies on main memory for data storage rather than disk drives.

Kummert said Hekaton, now in the "private preview" stage of development, would be added to the next major release of SQL Server, but he didn't specify when that would be available.

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1, which is generally available today, is an update to SQL Server 2012 that began shipping earlier this year. The service pack adds support for Microsoft Office 2013, making it easier for users to tap into Office 2013 applications such as Excel and SharePoint for self-service business intelligence tasks, Microsoft said.

Microsoft executives at PASS offered a preview of the next release of SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse, the vendor's data warehouse appliance that's built on the SQL Server database. The release, which will include the new PolyBase engine, is due out by mid-2013.

PUBLISHED NOV. 7, 2012