Comment MySQL in-memory speed (Score 5, Interesting) 168
Slightly off-topic, but I recently had the oppurtunity to test the speed of a MySQL in-memory database. I have some frequently queried read-only data that simply would not handle the load in MS SQL and was looking for an in-memory solution. MySQL provided the simplest implementation - simply tell the table to use memory storage and configure the server to allow the amount of data you want to host (~250MB in this case). You also have to remember to reload the data from normal InnoDB tables every time you restart the server. I used the same table structures, keys indexes and stored procedures (almost the same) to query the data and linked it through MS SQL so that my applications never new the difference. On exactly the same hardware the speed increase was at least 50X over MS SQL.