Relevant excerpt:

The MySQL server now includes the widely used memcached in-memory caching system, and a plugin that allows fast NoSQL-style access to InnoDB tables through the memcached protocol. This access method avoids the overhead of SQL parsing and constructing a query optimization plan. You can store the underlying data in a single InnoDB table, or spread it across multiple tables. You can read and write data through both memcached and SQL. For example, you can do fast single-key lookups through memcached get calls, and do statistical reports across all the data through SQL.