Memcached, the open source caching software framework, has been gaining attention from web companies and investors. Gear6 has annnounced details of a new memcached-based product, and Schooner Information Technologies has a set of server appliances, one targeted to MySQL, and one to memcached. Memcached is a tool that's widely used to reduce query times when using databases, through caching, and there was a lot of interest in it at the recent MySQL Conference. In this post on GigaOm, Gary Orenstein analyzes the newfound interest in memcached, and ponders whether it's good or bad for MySQL. 

"Gear6 today released Web Cache in an effort to commercialize the Internet’s predominant (de facto, for Linux) distributed caching protocol, memcached," writes Derrick Harris at GigaOm. "Every Top 20 web site not owned by Microsoft uses memcached (Facebook has almost 1,000 servers dedicated to its memcached tier) and 50-60 percent of all Alexa-ranked Top 10,000 sites use it to some degree, according to Joaquin Ruiz, EVP of products and corporate development at Gear6. With Web Cache, Gear6 is offering a turnkey solution that brings high availability to memcached, as well as significant capital and operating expenditure savings." Check out the details at GigaOm. 

For many developers focused on applications that reside on the web, including open source developers working on database-centric and software-as-a-service sites, the issue of scaling applications is increasingly important. You can find a couple of recent columns we did on cloud computing solutions for scaling applications here. Today, a post on scalability over at James Hamilton's blog caught my eye. He starts out with a discussion of how the database architecture underlying Flickr is constructed, but what's really striking is his  collection of posts from around the web on how sites ranging from Craigslist to Technorati to Second Life approach scalability.