No, I don't think I mentioned using memcached as a database. Memcached allows me to use multiple machines to cache data in a transparent manner. It allows me to use more, cheaper machines rather than one big expensive machine. I have heard people describe this tactic as "build out, not up."

A common use case is to cache the results of an SQL query. I use the query as the cache key and the value is the result set from the query. I check the cache to see if the dataset is there. If it is, I get it from the cache. If it isn't, I run the SQL and put the results in the cache. This provides me with a huge speedup.

If the data in the database gets updated, I flush the cache and start again. This is not a problem for parts of my application, so those are the parts where I use memcached. Instead of storing lot of data in a perl data structure in mod_perl program and counting on the copy-on-write mechanism to save RAM, I use memcached.