In this case the amount of data and the frequency with which it needs to be updated made handling this in MySQL more practical. I otherwise would've had to have

In this case the amount of data and the frequency with which it needs to be updated made handling this in MySQL more practical. I otherwise would've had to have some process querying and updating the records outside of MySQL and it turns out that that puts a whole lot more load on the server than if I just ask MySQL to do it. And besides, what happened to the hacker ethos? "Because I can" should be justification enough. :-)