[mhd]

Sorry about the awkwardly worded question. What I meant is, what do you actually get from using MySQL? I can understand that a lot of people aren't willing to make a switch to some dedicated KVS, but going through all that effort would seem to require the same amount of time, if not more. So there has to be something about using MySQL that makes it worth using even in this stripped down configuration.

[mike-cardwell]

I think the idea is that you store your data in a relational model and access it using SQL. But for things that need to be looked up a lot, and very quickly, rather than tagging on a KV store in front of MySQL, use the method he describes instead.

This way you don't end up duplicating the cache, it is shared between the two different types of lookups. You also don't end up with data inconsistancies. And yet you get the speed that a dedicated KV store would have got you anyway.

[quassnoi]

What do you actually get from using MySQL?

Convenience of the complex queries. If you need anything more than a simple key-value access, you'll in fact need to implement the query engine yourself if you decide to use NoSQL.

Note that the author specifically mentioned that they use HandlerSocket for fast key retrievals and SQL for complex queries, and both methods work together on the very same database.