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.

Pedro Mejia-Alvarez received his BSc degree in computer systems from ITESM, Querétaro, Mexico, in 1985, his PhD degree in Informatics from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, in 1995. He pursued his PostDoc Research at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pittsburgh in 1999-2000. He has been a Professor with the Cinvestav-Guadalajara since 1997. His research interests include Real-Time Systems, Software Testing and Software Engineering.

Marcelo Leon Ayala received his MSc in Electrical Engineering from CINVESTAV-Guadalajara. He is now a Software Engineer at Oracle.

Susana Ortega-Cisneros received her BSc degree in communications and electronics from the Universidad de Guadalajara, México, in 1990, the MSc degree from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV),  México City, México, and the PhD degree in computer science and telecommunications from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. Sheis currently with CINVESTAV and specializes in the design of digital architectures based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), DSPs, and microprocessors.