Oracle's thinking is that the Memecached interface can serve as an alternative access point for MySQL itself. Much of the putative sluggishness of SQL-based systems actually stems from the overhead of supporting a fully ACID-based query infrastructure needed to execute complex queries, industry observers said. By providing a NoSQL alternative access method, Oracle could offer customers the best of both worlds--a database that is fully ACID-compliant and has the speed of a NoSQL database.

With Memcached you are not accessing the data through SQL, but by a simple key-value lookup. "You can do a simple key-value-type lookup and get very optimal performance," Ulin said.

The technology would not require any changes to MySQL itself. "We can just plug it in," Ulin said. He added that Oracle was considering including this technology in the next version of MySQL, version 5.6.

One precursor to Oracle's work is a MySQL technology developed by developers outside of Oracle, , which also used Memecached as the basis of MySQL access, said Peter Zaitsev, the founder and CEO of MySQL service provider Percona.

With HandlerSocket, "you could get close to 1 million lookups per second on a single server, which is almost 10 times what you could get with a MySQL interface," Zaitsev said. Percona has already installed HandlerSocket MySQL implementation, Percona Server.