The ever-increasing performance demands of web-based services have generated significant interest in simple data access methods that maximize performance. These techniques are broadly classified under the name “NoSQL”: to increase performance and throughput, they take away the overhead of parsing an SQL statement, constructing an execution plan, and dealing with strongly typed data values split into multiple fields.

MySQL 5.6 includes a NoSQL interface, using an integrated memcached daemon that can automatically store data and retrieve it from InnoDB tables, turning the MySQL server into a fast “key-value store” for single-row insert, update, or delete operations. You can still also access the same tables through SQL for convenience, complex queries, bulk operations, application compatibility, and other strengths of traditional database software.

With this NoSQL interface, you use the familiar memcached API to speed up database operations, letting InnoDB handle memory caching using its buffer pool mechanism. Data modified through memcached operations such as ADD, SET, INCR are stored to disk, using the familiar InnoDB mechanisms such as change buffering, the doublewrite buffer, and crash recovery. The combination of memcached simplicity and InnoDB durability provides users with the best of both worlds, as explained in Section 14.2.9.1, “Benefits of the InnoDB / memcached Combination”. For architectural details about how the components fit together, see Section 14.2.9.2, “Architecture of InnoDB and memcached Integration”.