There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

I’m shifting away from LiveJournal. It lacks ability to search and otherwise peruse archived blog posts. And of course it’s only me, while Open Query has more people.

From now on the posts will be at http://openquery.com/blog/ and this is aggregated to Planet MySQL as a group blog. You may have already seen Walter posting from his seat at the MySQL Conf. All posts and comments from my LJ blog have been migrated to WordPress, thanks to magic performed by young Akash Mehta. Unfortunately the comment threading can’t be exported.

The full export means that my personal posts are now also present at Open Query, although I may move those elsewhere later. The existing blog entries on LJ will stay for a while at least, although I do have to pay for the LiveJournal subdomain to keep the URLs alive.

A little sidenote …

Have you used your tag browser yet?

http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/tag/

It's neat. But there are a couple of things I'd like to see put into it. I'd like to see a redirect to /tag in the case of a single tag argument, and I'd like to see multiple tag arguments handled.

Whee. Should only be a modification to a WHERE statement in conjunction with splitting the cgi query string up in a manageable way.

So. I talked to Junior, and he pointed me at the right places to twiddle in order to get the change into the codebase.



Probably the best plan of action:

cgi-bin/ljfeed.pl
Pass "tagids" arrayref of tag ids to LJ::get_recent_items call

cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal.pm
Whatever code path does the call to generate feeds, make it respect a "?tag=foo" GET …