Hi there, This is the first time I'm approaching an extremely high-volume situation. This is an ad server based on MySQL. However, the query that is used incorporates a lot of JOINs and is generally just slow. (This is Rails ActiveRecord, btw) sel = Ads.find(:all, :select = '*', :joins = "JOIN campaigns ON ads.campaign_id = campaigns.id JOIN users ON campaigns.user_id = users.id LEFT JOIN countries ON countries.campaign_id = campaigns.id LEFT JOIN keywords ON keywords.campaign_id = campaigns.id", :conditions = [flashstr + "keywords.word = ? AND ads.format = ? AND campaigns.cenabled = 1 AND (countries.country IS NULL OR countries.country = ?) AND ads.enabled = 1 AND campaigns.dailyenabled = 1 AND users.uenabled = 1", kw, format, viewer['country'][0]], :order = order, :limit = limit) My questions: Is there an alternative database like MySQL that has JOIN support, but is much faster? (I know there's Postgre, still evaluating it.) Otherwise, would firing up a MySQL instance, loading a local database into memory and re-loading that every 5 minutes help? Otherwise, is there any way I could switch this entire operation to Redis or Cassandra, and somehow change the JOIN behavior to match the (non-JOIN-able) nature of NoSQL? Thank you!