Memcached Vendors Bulk Up for Web 2.0

Caching In on Open Source

A pair of vendors that offer proprietary solutions based on the open source memcached project are updating their products this week. While both Gear6 and Schooner are adding their own proprietary bits to enhance their respective memcached-based offerings, both vendors are also ensuring that they also are contributing back to the open source core.

Memcached is an open source distributed memory-based object caching system that enables Web 2.0 applications to scale to meet the needs of high-traffic production usage. While memcached has benefits for users of the MySQL database, both Gear6 and Schooner are now expanding support to include NoSQL type databases as well. Both vendors are also improving the key value store component of memcached, though each vendor is taking their own approach.

Gear6 is adding native query support to its new implementation of memcached.

"This expands the query capability extensively," Mark Atwood, director of community development at Gear6, told InternetNews.com. "In the past, for memcached you could only query memcached if you already knew the key value. With this you can actually run more advanced queries."

One example cited by Atwood of an advanced query that the new Gear6 distribution of memcached can perform is to show all the login cookies for users in a certain geography. Atwood added with the new capabilities Gear6 can be used as a data store in addition to just being a caching layer for MySQL.

"So instead of just using memcached as a caching layer for MySQL, using MySQL for sophisticated queries and Gear6 for query acceleration, you can actually keep real data in the Gear6 memcached and run queries against it," Atwood said.

According to Atwood the native query capability is something that is specific to Gear 6 memcached and it isn't in the open source version yet.

"I'm a big fan of open source and I would like to see these queries in the community edition, " Atwood said. "It would be good for the community and Gear6. The more powerful memcached gets, the more people will want to use it and some of those people will need support and a vendor they can go too."

Gear6 delivers memcached as a software distribution and also provides a cloud based offering as well.