I’ve been messing around with memcached and php-pecl-memcache to cache sql query result. Many web sites & applications such as Facebook, LiveJournal, Flickr, Slashdot, WikiPedia/MediaWiki, SourceForge, Digg and Twitter use memcached to enhance their performance.

Memcached (Memory Cache Daemon) was developed by the team at LiveJournal to improve performance of their social blogging site by minimizing the impact of the bottleneck caused by reading data directly from the database. Memcached is a server that caches Name Value Pairs in memory. The “Name”, or key, is limited to 250 characters, and the “Value” is limited to 1MB in size. Values can consist of data, HTML  Fragments, or binary objects; almost any type of data that can be serialized and fits in memcached can be stored.

here is simple example/demonstration how to cache regular sql query

First of all, we need memcached daemon run on system

$ ps ax | grep memcached
 8955 ?        Ssl    0:00 memcached -d -p 11211 -u memcached -m 256 -c 1024 -P /var/run/memcached/memcached.pid -l 127.0.0.1

Setup simple mysql database/tables as shown bellow:

mysql-shell> CREATE DATABASE memcache;

Copy/Paste this tables schema to your mysql shell/console

CREATE TABLE memc
(
 personID int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 PRIMARY KEY(personID),
 FirstName varchar(15),
 LastName varchar(15),
 Age int
);
hit enter/return key

Insert some data

mysql-shell> INSERT INTO memc (FirstName, LastName, Age) VALUES('Memory', 'Cache', '100');