Fast insertion – what Tokutek excels at – isn’t only important for handling high data rates. It also enables a new way to extract value from an existing database called ad hoc indexing. KAYAK has a billion rows stored in TokuDB and adding an index for a traditional MySQL storage engine would take too long to be of any practical value. With TokuDB, however, an index can be created on the fly to accelerate any ad hoc query that would otherwise be causing a vastly slower full table scan.

Here are the details.

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 …