The session has been recorded. The webex file and the webinar are available here.

Here is the Q&A session, with more detailed answers.

Q from Tomasz: You said memcached is integrated with, among others, MySQL. Did you mean integration by e.g. php or direct, automatic integration?
A: Memcached API are available for many enviroments, such as Php, Perl, C/C++, Rails etc. With MySQL, you can use UDF functions or a storage engine. Both are community projects.

Q from Juan: memcached: Facts data size up to 1MB? What size, i dont understand!
A: It's the size of an item associated to a key. When you store an element (item) into memcached, the size of the key is max 250 bytes and the item is max 1MByte.

Q from Frederik: Do memcached save data in RAM or disk?
A: It is RAM …

SimpleXML is neat.  Some people don't think it is so simple.  Boy, use the old stuff.  The DOM-XML stuff.

Anyhow, one annoying thing about SimpleXML has to do with caching.  When using web services, we often cache the contents we get back.  We were having a problem where we would get an error about a SimpleXML node not existing.  We were caching the data in memcached which serializes the variable.  So, when it unserialized the variable, there were references in there to some SimpleXML nodes that we did not take care of.  Basically, a tag like:

<foo>bar</foo>

is a string.  But a tag like:

<foo></foo>

is an empty SimpleXML …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Memcached UDFs for MySQL. This release contains the ability to now pass expiration values. For instance, you can:

select memc_set('keyabc', 'somevalue')

or

select memc_set('keyabc', 'I die in 10 seconds', 10);

The functions that now have this ability are:

memc_set()
memc_set_by_key()
memc_append()
memc_append_by_key()
memc_prepend()
memc_prepend_by_key()
memc_add()
memc_add_by_key()
memc_replace()
memc_replace_by_key()

You can download the latest archive from http://patg.net/downloads/memcached_functions_mysql-0.5.tar.gz

Also, mercurial repository at …

A big thank you to all those who attended the memcached webinar today on which I was a panelist. I was told that there were more than 560 registrants.

The feedback I received directly and indirectly shows that there is a lot of interest about memcached. In the future, I hope to work again with MySQL/Sun on more memcached related webinars.

If you attended the webinar and have some suggestions, comments or questions, please contact me at fmashraqi at yahoo dot com or post a comment on this blog.

Special thanks to Jimmy Guerrero, Monty Taylor, Rich Taylor, Edwin DeSouza and Alex Roedling for their hard work in arranging the webinar. Also thanks to Brian Aker, Matt Ingenthron and Trond Norbye for their assistance at various phases.

In case you missed the webinar:

• webinar recording: …

During the webinar "Highly scalable solutions with MySQL and Memcached" Ivan Zoratti announced that Sun will support Memcached as a part of MySQL Enterprise Support.

You may want to check you the white paper "Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL"

There is another webinar later on today (Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL), so if you missed out on yesterdays …

Regarding my earlier post on memcached webinar, I was informed today that more than 420 registrants have signed up. Space is limited and filling up fast so if you are interested in memcached and haven't registered yet, click on the following link to register now!

Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL (June 29)

Quick link: register for Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL webinar (June 29)
Ever since its introduction, memcached has been changing the way cost-efficient caching is perceived. Some passionately love it, others cynically hate it.

Today, many large scale web 2.0 properties (including my employer) save millions of dollars by depending on memcached to bring their application response time under control and to offload pressure from databases.

There are several success stories about …

This week Sun will host the first two free webinars on MySQL and Memcached. Ivan Zoratti will kick off on Wednesday with "Highly scalable solutions with MySQL and Memcached".

On Thursday Monty Taylor, Jimmy Guerrero and Frank Mash will talk about "Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL".

You should do as I did and register for the event as soon as possible :-)

Are you ready for the next webinar? This time we will talk about the use of MySQL with memcached. Most of you may already know memcached and how to use it in a typical web environment with high traffic and requirements for high scalability.

During the webinar we will cover different scenarios and best practices regarding the use of MySQL and memcached together.

The webinar will be live next week, Wednesday 28th of May @ 9am GMTD (London, Dublin, Lisbon) / 10am CETD (Paris, Madrid, Munich, Rome etc.)

The registration is available here.
I hope to see you all online next week!
-ivan

With all due respect to the technology and it's advocates (myself included), after a surge in articles describing the merits of using memcached I'm just pushing a thought breakpoint for developers to think whether they actually need it or not?

Recently, I ran into cases where the developers have decided to use memcached over MySQL style architecture after reading some/many good/nice articles about it without giving a damn to their requirements. I would like to list few things as a checklist for developers to decide on their architecture. There is still no precise answer but sometimes few cases can be just ruled out :).

1. What is the total size of your data? It might be a possibility that you can keep the data in memory in each node, or MySQL can just keep the whole thing (data+indexes) in a buffer.
2. How frequently your data is updated? Very frequent updates may lead to low cache hit ratio for memcached …