Huh? First off, the memcached api is talking to InnoDB directly not the other way around. This means that you can dramatically reduce the latency of queries tha

Huh? First off, the memcached api is talking to InnoDB directly not the other way around. This means that you can dramatically reduce the latency of queries that would previously require you to maintain a bunch of cache and the complexity that comes with it and you would incur the overhead of going to both the memcached server and the database on a cache miss(For complicated queries the you might have to continually hit many cache servers and then the database multiple times, this means only a single connection is needed even in the worsst case that the data isn't in RAM). This also has the advantage that a cache miss doesn't force the SQL layer to come into play just to fetch an item from disk and then have the application stick it into the cache(so your cache is just the page cache in InnoDB; this is much more efficient than application managed memcached). So yes, this is very cool.