A closer look
Moving a massive enterprise database from agonizingly slow hard drives into ultrafast RAM is the ultimate speed hack, but memory chips are incredibly expensive and limited in capacity. To make in-memory databases like SAP HANA financially viable, engineers rely on aggressively ruthless dictionary-based compression engines. Instead of storing repeated data points millions of times, the system replaces them with microscopic integer pointers, crushing terabytes of bloated corporate data down so it can be queried in literal milliseconds.
