NorthScale's own Patrick Galbraith has, for many years now, authored and maintained the MySQL, and now Drizzle, UDFs for memcached. Last week, Patrick took this one step further with the latest release, version 1.1, which now includes support for "check and set" (a.k.a. CAS) operations.
User Defined Functions are available for a number of different databases. This allows some kind of stored procedure language or other triggers to execute other code imported into the DB. In the case of the memcached UDF, this means giving stored procedures the ability to call memcached operations.
The general idea here is pretty simple. Most applications start with a database, though it's always possible to use web services or flat files. Regardless of where the data is persisted, to keep the cache always up to date with the System of …
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