Memcache access for MySQL Cluster (or NDBCluster) provides faster access to the data because it avoids the SQL parsing overhead for simple lookups – which is a great feature. But what happens if I try to get multiple records via memcache API (multi-GET) and via SQL (SELECT with IN())? I’ve encountered this a few times now, so I decided to blog about it. I did a very simple benchmark with the following script:

#!/bin/bash
mysql_server="192.168.56.75"
mc_server="192.168.56.75"
mysql_cmd="mysql -h${mysql_server} --silent --silent"
mysql_schema="percona"
mysql_table="memcache_t"
mc_port=11211
mc_prefix="mt:"
function populate_data () {
  nrec=$1
  $mysql_cmd -e "delete from ${mysql_table};" $mysql_schema > /dev/null 2>&1
  for rec in `seq 1 $nrec`
  do
    $mysql_cmd -e "insert into ${mysql_table} values ($rec, repeat('a',10), 0, 0);" $mysql_schema > /dev/null 2>&1
  done
}
function mget_via_sql() {
  nrec=$1
  in_list=''
  for rec in …