Recent changes in the documentation for SQL Server 2014 have include some significant changes that will have a fantastic impact on Standard Edition customers.
More Memory: The first s that the supported memory limit per instance is raised to 128 GB in SQL Server 2014
Buffer pool extensions: The Buffer Pool is one of the main memory consumers in SQL Server. When you read data from your storage, the data is cached in the Buffer Pool. SQL Server caches Execution Plans in the Plan Cache, which is also part of the Buffer Pool. The more physical memory you have, the larger your Buffer Pool will be (configured through the Max Server Memory setting). The Buffer Pool itself, is very fast (regarding latency).
The Buffer Pool Extensions itself consist of one file (the Extension File) that should be stored on very fast storage – i.e. an SSD drive. The Extension File is similar to the page file in the Windows OS. Instead of adding additional physical memory to your database server, configure an Extension File on a SSD drive – that’s it!
Memory pressure occurs when SQL Server needs more memory than is currently available. In that case the Buffer evicts pages from the Buffer Pool, which were least recently used. SQL Server uses a Least Recently Used Policy (LRU). If you have configured an Extension File, then SQL Server will write these pages into it, instead of writing directly out to our slow storage. If the page is a dirty one, then the page will be also concurrently written to the physical storage (through an asynchronous I/O operation). Therefore you can’t lose any data when you are dealing with the Buffer Pool Extensions. At some point in time your Extension File will be also completely full. In that case SQL Server has to evict older pages from the Extension File (again through a LRU policy), and finally writes those to the physical storage. The Extension File just acts as an additional layer between the Buffer Pool and the storage itself.
