Optimizing database by caching

[xgm541]

I am a research person for a small web project based on php/mySQL. I was asked to look on how to implement memcached into the database so that the queries will be cached and the load times will be faster.

 

here is the link to memcached

http://www.danga.com/memcached/

 

so by doing my research  , i found that it is a addon to PHP in which the programmer would have to cache the queries himself into objects. Here is the problem. The project is hosted on a shared hosting server, meaning there is no access to the php configuration itself so installing the addon would probably be impossible. Once the project goes live however, we would be moving to a dedicated server, which in that case, installing it would not be much of a problem but I know myself that our main coder dislikes object oriented PHP.

 

so, i want you guys' input. If anyone has any experience with memcached, can you tell me if it was a hassle to get it up and running, and what about implementing it? Would it be better if we simply used mysql query cache? What other caching tools are out there?

 

thanks