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What you suggest is pretty much what everyone did before memcached: load your database server with ram and use various tricks to pin the important stuff in memory.

However the memcached code path is pretty lean and will give you better performance than in-memory mysql for single key/value lookups.

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There's a patent for storing a specific database structure in memory and therefore MySQL Server memory tables use a hash structure to avoid this patent. This would very well when you lookup a row which is present. However, the entire hash is enumerated when an row is not present. So, perversely, you'd get more performance with MyISAM, a RAID card and a big disk buffer.

You could use memcached. However, if you are developing REST web services, you can retrospectively introduce Squid without changing your code.

Do you know the number of the patent for this?

No idea. However, it specifically affected B-trees in memory. A search revealed US Patent 5283894: Lockless concurrent B-tree index meta access method for cached nodes ( http://www.patentmonkey.com/PM/PatentID/5283894.aspx ) which may or may not be relevant.

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