Wikipedia defines computer memory as:
In computing, memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs (sequences of instructions) or data (e.g. program state information) on a temporary or permanent basis for use in a computer or other digital electronic device. The term primary memory is used for the information in physical systems which are fast (i.e. RAM), as a distinction from secondary memory, which are physical devices for program and data storage which are slow to access but offer higher memory capacity. Primary memory stored on secondary memory is called “virtual memory“.
The term “storage” is often (but not always) used in separate computers of traditional secondary memory such as tape, magnetic disks and optical discs (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM). The term “memory” is often (but not always) associated with addressable semiconductor memory, i.e. integrated circuits consisting of silicon-based transistors, used for example as primary memory but also other purposes in computers and other digital electronic devices.
To a computer program like a DBMS, memory is a resource allocated using commands like malloc() and calloc(). Note that these commands allocate primary memory using the definition above. From this you should conclude that an in-memory DBMS (IMDB) is a system that puts all of its data into memory allocated by the database program.
In their announcements this week Oracle states (here) that Exadata 3 is an in-memory database machine and Larry Ellison said. “Everything is in memory. All of your databases are in-memory. You virtually never use your disk drives. Disk drives are becoming passe. They’re good at storing images and a lot of data we don’t access very often.”
But their definition of in-memory includes SSD devices that are not directly addressable by the DBMS. In fact they use 22TB of SSDs and 4TB of DRAM. The SSDs are a cache sitting between the DBMS and disk storage. They are storage according to Wikipedia.
Exadata 3 is not an in-memory database machine. It takes more than lots of hardware to make a DBMS an in-memory DBMS.
Oracle is spewing marketing, not architecture.