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.