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No. First, learn the internals of your system. Learn SQL. Learn NoSQL. Understand why your software is slow. Then, once you've optimized the worst case away with decent SQL and/or a good object-oriented architecture. Then and only then should you start with caching. Too many developers these days are just brainless monkeys who dump everything in memcache.

A coworker mentioned to me that she came in early every day so she could run a report that took about an hour and a half before the CEO got in.

I looked at the code, nothing looked THAT bad, so I did an EXPLAIN, noticed a missing index, added it. I ran the report in 4 minutes.

Clearly, whoever wrote that report didn't know nearly enough about SQL.

Throwing caching at poorly written database code is exactly like when parents tell their children to tidy their room and then they shove everything under the bed. You can only do that for so long, at some point you need to clean that room up.

Can't you learn both?

He's referring to the fact that the site is down already.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Agun.i...