Caching location based data?

[John Kramlich]

Josh,
> Out of curiosity, why aren't you using PostGIS?   It has special indexing 
> types for the sort of query you mention.   While not as fast as memcached, if 
> you can keep those indexes in memory they are < 50ms to return a lot of 
> queries.
>
> At some point I'll also post a proof-of-concept for the db-based invalidation 
> technique I'm using for one project which can get around the regex 
> invalidation not being implemented yet.
>
>   
Thanks for the suggestion.  I didn't know that PostGIS existed.  It 
looks like there are similar features through a MySQL extension.  For 
better or worse, our site is heavily reliant on MySQL as it's integrated 
into the code almost everywhere.  I will take a look at both though.  We 
are still new enough that switching databases isn't completely out of 
the question.

The realm of location based data is new to me.   I've got a lot to learn.

- John