1. After I buy the product, can I use the same method of taking it and my workproduct with me on my laptop and then updating my desktop when I return?
No, however, if you buy a Professional or a Developer Edition you will be eligible for two product keys - you can use one key for your production server and another one - for your laptop to do a single user development work. You can then exchange configurations easily between two computers by exporting/importing configurations into a BSV file.
2. For speed, one of the newer programming techniques is to download tables from the disk based relational database into in-memory databases (or arrays) since memory is so cheap, and only writing back to the disk when adding or editing a record. Do you/will you support this technique? If so, what are the commands by which we program this?
I believe this technique is already being implemented by database vendors such as MySQL or SQL Server. You do not need to do any special programming to support it. If the underlying database supports it Aware IM supports it too.