This book provides basic knowledge about main memory management in relational databases as it is needed to support large-scale applications processed completely in memory. In business operations, real-time predictability and high speed is a must. Hence every opportunity must be exploited to improve performance, including reducing dependency on the hard disk, adding more memory to make more data resident in the memory, and even deploying an in-memory system where all data can be kept in memory.

The book provides one chapter for each of the main related topics, i.e. the memory system, memory management, virtual memory, and databases and their memory systems, and it is complemented by a short survey of six commercial systems: TimesTen, MySQL, VoltDB, Hekaton, HyPer/ScyPer, and SAP HANA.