Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > Guides > Microsoft SQL 2019 on Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) Using Dell PowerEdge Servers > Solution description
No organization can afford to sacrifice performance or business results. It is especially important to avoid problems arising from database technologies that are not optimized. Often a complete overhaul of existing environments is not an option, especially when organizations are trying to keep costs down.
Nonvolatile memory (NVM) is an emerging technology that has the persistence characteristics of large-capacity storage devices (for example, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid-State Drives (SSDs)). NVM also provides the byte-addressability and low latency of traditional DRAM memory. This unique combination of features provides new design considerations when building a database management system (DBMS), such as:
However, interacting with NVM requires changes to application software to best use the storage device (for example “mmap” and “clflush” of small cachelines instead of “write” and “fsync” of large page buffers). Before introducing code changes to the DBMS for NVM, developers must have a clear understanding of NVM performance in various conditions to help make better design choices.
To meet the needs of modern datasets and workloads, Microsoft SQL Server 2019 has introduced many new features and capabilities. These features can use better and faster hardware to improve performance and add value to existing business applications. SQL Server 2019 (15.x) has several features, such as Tail of Log (also known as Persisted Log Buffer), enlightenment, and the hybrid buffer pool (HBP), that use persistent memory to improve the performance of the workload cost-effectively.