A vast majority of medical information systems use Standard Query Language databases (SQL) as the underlying technology to deliver medical records in a timely and efficient manner. SQL is a standardised and well entrenched database technology, which allows for the development of robust, customised applications for information management. In recent years, SQL has been used as the back-end to man...

i Abstract Database Management and transaction processing systems occupy a crucial position in our information technology-based world. It is imperative that these systems function correctly and reflect real world actions on the data that they store, manage and manipulate. The constantly evolving nature of RDBMSs has lead to database wars among the various vendors in the market. This is evidence...

High performance and SMP scalability were key goals for the System 11 release of Sybase SQL Server. With System 11, Sybase has gone from about 1400 tpmC to 14000 tpmC. This leap in performance was achieved as a result of new features as well as extensive detailed performance studies and rework of the core server. Logical memory management via multiple buffer caches helped to fine tune the use o...

Over the last two releases SQL Server has integrated two specialized engines into the core system: the Apollo column store engine for analytical workloads and the Hekaton in-memory engine for high-performance OLTP workloads. There is an increasing demand for real-time analytics, that is, for running analytical queries and reporting on the same system as transaction processing so as to have acce...

Microsoft StreamInsight is a platform for developing and deploying streaming applications. StreamInsight embraces a temporal stream model to unify and further enrich query language features, handle imperfections in event delivery and define consistency guarantees on the output. With its extensibility framework, StreamInsight enables developers to integrate their domain expertise within the quer...

Azure SQL Database and the upcoming release of SQL Server enhance Online Index Rebuild to provide fault-tolerance and allow index rebuild operations to resume after a system failure or a userinitiated pause. SQL Server is the first commercial DBMS to support pause and resume functionality for index rebuilds. This is achieved by splitting the operation into incremental units of work and persisti...