I agree, in-memory hash table controlled manually by the application has a million ways to beat any SQL-server caching. What I am saying is that I suspect that

I agree, in-memory hash table controlled manually by the application has a million ways to beat any SQL-server caching. What I am saying is that I suspect that memcached is way overused by people who don't know much about SQL. I am not posing like a DB snob, in fact my skills are fairly modest, but even I know that query caching is just one of the many caches SQL servers employ, and well designed servers easily service thousand+ of requests per second. And that's just one instnace. Very very very few web sites ever reach such loads. In theory memcached should be more like a very niche product for such rare sites, yet it appears that everybody is using it. I am against it because it increases the complexity. Memcached deployment and cache control become two more things to get right. That's all.