There are a handful of wonderful software packages out there that I wouldn’t want to work without, including the free, open-source virtualization platform VirtualBox, which was acquired by Sun a few years ago, which in turn was bought by Oracle.

The other day, I was setting up a new virtual machine to run SQL Server 2014 with memory-optimized tables, which incidentally is one of the great reasons to update to 2014. Memory-optimized tables are tables that are stored in the RAM memory of the server. Some of the great advantages of working with “in-memory OLTP”, as it’s also known, include a greatly reduced number of latches and locks (accomplished with a form of row-versioning), which allows for a much larger number of concurrent users to work with the same data. With a few limitations, working with memory-optimized tables is transparent, so you’re using regular T-SQL DML commands.

Turns out, however, that SQL Server didn’t want to run memory-optimized code right out of the box on my VM. Instead, I got this:

Msg 41342, Level 15, State 2, Line 3
The model of the processor on the system does not support creating MEMORY_OPTIMIZED=ON. This error typically occurs with older processors. See SQL Server Books Online for information on supported models.

This message stems from the fact that the processor needs to support the CMPXCHG16B command (I have no idea what that does), which is available on pretty much any modern 64-bit processor. My physical processor is fairly new, so the issue is obviously with the VM software. In this case, it was just a matter of enabling a setting in VirtualBox, which can be done with the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "Your VM" VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1

I have no idea why this feature isn’t turned on by default, but once you’ve enabled it, it works like a charm. So, expect to see more blog posts about memory-optimized tables in the near future. :)