  In today world, organizations like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook etc. are
facing drastic increase in data. This leads to the problem of capturing,
storing, managing and analyzing terabytes or petabytes of data, stored in
multiple formats, from different internal and external sources. Moreover, new
applications scenarios like weather forecasting, trading, artificial
intelligence etc. need huge data processing in real time. These requirements
exceed the processing capacity of traditional on-disk database management
systems to manage this data and to give speedy real time results. Therefore,
data management needs new solutions for coping with the challenges of data
volumes and processing data in real-time. An in-memory database system (IMDS)
is a latest breed of database management system which is becoming answer to
above challenges with other supporting technologies. IMDS is capable to process
massive data distinctly faster. This paper explores IMDS approach and its
associated design issues and challenges. It also investigates some famous
commercial and open-source IMDS solutions available in the market.
