OStatic

What happens when your database is the bottleneck for your Web application?ﾠ You could create a database cluster, or even add new hardware.ﾠ But an open-source library called memcached offers another solution, putting frequently needed data in a server-accessible memory cache, whose values can be retrieved quickly and easily from almost every library.ﾠ Memcached is in use on many popular sites, including Facebook and LiveJournal, and you might find that it provides just the solution you need to make your site act faster.

With the open-source database market split between quite a few contenders, the ones who are not at the tip of everyone's tongue need to find ways to distinguish themselves. Ingres - the once closed-source database that was spun off from Computer Associates a few years back - continues to aim for the high-end corporate market. Their latest move in this strategy is the release of substantial portions of their OpenROAD 4GL as open source under a GPL license.