But that was his whole point - needlessly complicating an otherwise simple setup to get around limitations in the DB engine.

> mysql proxy might help you out, or mysql triggers, or plenty of easy indexing strategies.

I genuinely fail to see how mysql-proxy [1] (which has a sleuth of long-standing, unfixed, problems on its own), or triggers would (elegantly) help in this situation.

[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-proxy.html

edit: formatting