Ah, sure: I did not consider Redis at all. My goal in the Explore phase was to keep the data in the same process as my code, and replacing MySQL with any other

Ah, sure: I did not consider Redis at all. My goal in the Explore phase was to keep the data in the same process as my code, and replacing MySQL with any other database doesn't really help here. This was a developer-productivity goal, not a performance goal.