13 Benefits continued You can still access the underlying table through SQL, for reporting, analysis, ad hoc queries, bulk loading, set operations such as union and intersection, and other operations well suited to the expressiveness and flexibility of SQL. You can ensure high availability of the NoSQL data by using this feature on a master server in combination with MySQL replication. The integration of memcached with MySQL provides a painless way to make the in-memory data persistent, so you can use it for more significant kinds of data. You can put more add, incr, and similar write operations into your application, without worrying that the data could disappear at any moment. You can stop and start the memcached server without losing updates made to the cached data. To guard against unexpected outages, you can take advantage of InnoDB crash recovery, replication, and backup procedures. The way InnoDB does fast primary key lookups is a natural fit for memcached single-item queries. The direct, low-level database access path used by the memcached plugin is much more efficient for key- value lookups than equivalent SQL queries.