Kazuho@Cybozu Labs

It is a well-known fact that the bottlenecks of MySQL does not exist in its storage engines, but rather in the core, for example, its parser and execution planner.  Last weekend I started to wonder how fast MySQL could be if those bottlenecks were skipped.  Not being able to stop my curiousity, I started  adding memcached proctol support to MySQL as a UDF.  And that is Mycached.

From what I understand, there are two advantages of using mycached (or the memcached protocol, in general) over using SQL.  One is faster access.  The QPS (queries per second) of mycached is roughly 2x compared to using SQL.  The other is higher concurrency.  As can be seen in the chart below, mycached can handle thousands of connections simultaneously.

And the lack of the described advantages has been the reasons for large-scale web applications to use memcached, even though it requires application developers to take care of keeping consistency between mysql and memcached.  In other words, mycached could become a good alternative here.

Mycached is still in very early stage of development.  I would never recommend using current version in a production environment, but if you are interested, the details of how to use it is as follows.

Source code of mycached is available at coderepos.org/share/browser/platform/mysql/mycached