The Oracle Database In-Memory Option allows Oracle to function as the industry-first dual-format in-memory database. Row formats are ideal for OLTP workloads which typically use indexes to limit their data access to a small set of rows, while column formats are better suited for Analytic operations which typically examine a small number of columns from a large number of rows. Since no single data format is ideal for all types of workloads, our approach was to allow data to be simultaneously maintained in both formats with strict transactional consistency between them.

Over the last few years, the information technology industry has witnessed revolutions in multiple dimensions. Increasing ubiquitous sources of data have posed two connected challenges to data management solutions -- processing unprecedented volumes of data, and providing ad-hoc real-time analysis in mainstream production data stores without compromising regular transactional workload performance. In parallel, computer hardware systems are scaling out elastically, scaling up in the number of processors and cores, and increasing main memory capacity extensively. The data processing challenges combined with the rapid advancement of hardware systems has necessitated the evolution of a new breed of main-memory databases optimized for mixed OLTAP environments and designed to scale. The Oracle RDBMS In-memory Option (DBIM) is an industry-first distributed dual format architecture that allows a database object to be stored in columnar format in main memory highly optimized to break performance barriers in analytic query workloads, simultaneously maintaining transactional consistency with the corresponding OLTP optimized row-major format persisted in storage and accessed through database buffer cache. In this paper, we present the distributed, highly-available, and fault-tolerant architecture of the Oracle DBIM that enables the RDBMS to transparently scale out in a database cluster, both in terms of memory capacity and query processing throughput. We believe that the architecture is unique among all mainstream in-memory databases. It allows complete application-transparent, extremely scalable and automated distribution of Oracle RDBMS objects in-memory across a cluster, as well as across multiple NUMA nodes within a single server. It seamlessly provides distribution awareness to the Oracle SQL execution framework through affinitized fault-tolerant parallel execution within and across servers without explicit optimizer plan changes or query rewrites.