As its name implies, MemSQL achieves its fast performance in part by keeping data in memory, but it doesn’t use memcached like Facebook does to keep its massive MySQL deployment up to speed. Rather, MemSQL takes a lesson learned from HipHop — Facebook’s tool for converting PHP code into faster C++ — and converts SQL to C++.
“This is like HipHop for SQL, essentially,” Frenkiel told me during a recent call. All told, he claims MemSQL performs up to 30 times faster than disk-based databases. “If you make money off your data and you actually measure time in microsecond or milliseconds,” he said, “then using a lightning fast DB like ours makes a lot of sense.”
Via Nicolas Weil