Right but if someone showed a similar improvement by adding enough RAM to prevent swapping, would you be impressed? This is what is going on here. They have very much successfully proven that RAM is faster than HDD.
They have proven that SQL-based storage is faster than NOSQL databases.
The poster of the top comment doesn't understand what this topic is about.
This is actually a benchmark of InnoDB table access. You can query it using usual SQL-commands. But if you want faster access, you can use memcache API.
"Read-only" is also misleading here. This is just a benchmark of get command.
"They have proven that SQL-based storage is faster than NOSQL databases."
Too broad of a statement. 'NoSQL' is an umbrella term, and thus likely has several contenders for a raw QPS metric.
The additional step of parsing the query is obviated by statement caching. You're right though, it's simply a benchmark of how fast the query path is to the InnoDB buffer pool. The work is to optimize internal contention.