Memory Optimized Tables - can they really be so difficult to maintain?
No, in-memory really is this unpolished.  If you are familiar with Agile you will know the concept of "minimal shippable product"; in-memory is that.  I get the feeling that MS needed a response to SAP's Hana and its ilk.  This is what they could get debugged in the timeframe for a 2014 release.

As with anything else in-memory has costs and benefits associated with it.  The major benefit is the throughput that can be achieved.  One of the costs is the overhead for change management, as you mentioned.  This doesn't make it a useless product, in my opinion, it just reduces the number of cases where it will provide net benefit.  Just as columnstore indexes are now updatable and indexes can be filtered I have no doubt that the functionality of in-memory will improve over coming releases.



SQL Server 2016 is now generally available. Just as I supposed, In-Memory OLTP has received a number of enhancements. Most of the changes implement functionality that traditional tables have enjoyed for some time. My guess is that future features will be released at the same time for both in-memory and traditional tables. Temporal tables is a case-in-point. New in this version it is supported by both In-Memory and disk-based tables.