Hi Steve, this is Eric, one of the cofounders; to answer your question, it's about combining a few ideas together that make MemSQL a database that delivers on i

Hi Steve, this is Eric, one of the cofounders; to answer your question, it's about combining a few ideas together that make MemSQL a database that delivers on its promises. They are: - Data resides in memory with lock-free data structures - Full SQL, both operational and analytic - Distributes on commodity hardware, distributed query optimizer On its own, putting data in memory isn't enough. As you mentioned, MSSQL does it, as many other vendors. The gap though is that they are still single-box DBs. With a distributed database, not only do you get more storage, you also (and most importantly) get more compute power. Once the data is in-memory, using SQL to manipulate it and query it is the way to go. But again, once you escape a single box, you have to build a distributed query optimizer, which is hard stuff to say the least. Customers use MemSQL because they no longer need multi-million dollar Big Iron Appliances from the monolithic vendors. Customers want a cost-effective architecture that uses commodity web servers. We can prove the technology works by our customers who vouch for its efficacy. And, since we launched the Community Edition, please feel free to take MemSQL for a spin and even use it however you'd like. It's unlimited in both scale and capacity and has all the SQL features in the enterprise edition.