SteveMcKeogh.co.uk - Web Developer

I'm in the process of building a huge site, that could potentially have 2+ million registered users, therefore I need to have some kind of advanced caching going on for my Oracle queries. Sure, ColdFusion query caching is ok, but I don't have much control over it, and it's not as advanced as memcached, as memcached's sole purpose is to cache... and it's FAST!

The memcached site doesn't boast too much about the Microsoft Windows version of memcached, but there is a port, you just need to look for it... or you can follow this link straight there.

To tell you what memcached does (for those not in the know) here is how Danga Interactive (the developers of memcached) themselves describe it:

"memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load."

memcached is very easy to implement, and once in your code you can speed up large database queries considerably!

As memcached simply collects the the query data, it doesn't care if you are using Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server etc, it will take the results of the query and cache it with a unique key (that you supply). When you make a call for the same query again, memcached will check if it has a cached result for that query, if so it will spit the cached version out and never touch the database.

memcached is very flexible, you specify the timeout for the cached query, if you want to clear the cache for a specific key (or all keys if you want) then just tell memcached in your code and it will clear the cache for the key, the next visitor to run that query will then rehash that key until the timeout is reached.

memcached can be setup to run with any language, you just need to get it in there. I personally have only used it with ColdFusion, but head over to the memcached site and have a read about ways to get it working with your site.