Feature improvements

While being able to alter existing objects without having to drop them first is a welcome improvement, many developers are more interested in being able to use data types and T-SQL syntax in the In-Memory OLTP engine that go beyond the basics. In SQL Server 2016 and 2017, we were presented with a great deal of extra support, as is typical with a feature that has matured beyond initial introduction. In this section of the chapter, we will take a look at what areas of the database engine are now supported in the In-Memory OLTP engine.

Collations

The first major addition is the fact that both memory-optimized tables and natively compiled stored procedures support all code pages and collations that SQL Server supports. The previous limitation of only a supporting a subset of collations otherwise available in SQL Server has been completely removed from the product (a newly supported collation has been used in the test table in the demo scripts in this chapter)

This improvement...