You Got NoSQL in MySQL: Memcached Plugin in MySQL Technology Preview

My experience with MySQL (and Postgres and Oracle to a lesser extent) is that it is precisely the general-case optimizations built into the database that make the NoSQL use case really hard.

Have you ever designed a large MySQL database that you wish to persist to disk but the use cases of your app require keeping the entire table in RAM?

NoSQL implies a developer commitment to a certain, restricted set of use cases for data access (and sometimes storage). In exchange, you get extreme granularity over how the server stores and retrieves data. Once you do that, you frequently get at least an order of magnitude speedup in your data, maybe 2 orders, depending on the data and access patterns.

I do not anticipate significant numbers of people dumping their redis or membase stores for this solution, because the press release strongly implies a 1.2-1.5x speedup for certain data access, not 10x-100x. 1.5x isn't good enough; if it were, people would have tuned MySQL some other way originally rather than moving architecture over to KV stores like they did.

This will likely get uptake from people who are already committed to MySQL and occasionally want to use a KV store for certain data patterns. I would anticipate, though, that this will just make it easier for those folks to move their KV store out of MySQL once it scales.

And that's not such a bad thing to offer to people, so I take back my earlier disappointment.