Few queries on atomicity of requests

[Daniel]

Hi

> While I'm not sure which database you use, Microsoft SQL Server (yes,
> I do use Windows, but I'm agnostic about it, MS products just pay me
> more ;)), Informix, MySQL and Oracle (I assume, I haven't done much
> with that) all have some caching built into them. It varies from
> server to server but basically the most used data will be kept in an
> internal cache if possible.

> What you've described is, to some extent, what most database servers
> already do and are optimized to handle caching.
> 

Yes, but as far as I know, all the current database caching systems only
a small amount of caching in the core database servers. These requests
still need to be processed by the core database. Memcached is proof
positive that there is a real need for distributed caching that avoids
the core database...  


> Are you looking to solve a specific problem by integrating memcached
> directly into the database?

No, we're a tiny outfit getting setup to do great things. I've spent
weeks building memcached into my application code, thinking the whole
time that this is the wrong way to solve the problem, especially since
it's a problem that occurs at most every high traffic database.

For example, even Amazon.com has faced this problem, only they came up
with a different solution...  what they call an "eventually consistent"
database where, as I understand it, they have many separate database
servers that operate semi-independently to meet the applications needs
immediately, and work in the background to piece the data back together,
probably based on timestamps.

I'm for having these emails spark the development of an open source
database that is an order of magnitude faster than anything we've seen
yet!