For many years, databases have benefited from a caching tier due to its ability to reduce latency during high throughput by caching reads, writes, and frequently executed query results. Caching tiers are essential to prevent overloading databases and to balance the trade-off between fast updates and fast queries, as databases typically cannot optimize both simultaneously. They also improve query performance on large datasets. The choice between using solutions like Memcached or Redis, or opting for a consolidated database and caching tier, depends on specific application needs.