Load static Django database into memory
Does the disk IO really become the bottleneck of your application's performance and affect your user experience? If not, I don't think this kind of optimization is necessary.
Operating system and RDBMS (e.g MySQL , PostgresQL) are really smart nowdays. The data in the disk will be cached in memory by RDBMS and OS automatically.
I'm working with a somewhat large set (~30000 records) of data that my Django app needs to retrieve on a regular basis.  This data doesn't really change often (maybe once a month or so), and the changes that are made are done in a batch, so the DB solution I'm trying to arrive at is pretty much read-only.  
The total size of this dataset is about 20mb, and my first thought is that I can load it into memory (possibly as a singleton on an object) and access it very fast that way, though I'm wondering if there are other, more efficient ways of decreasing the fetch time by avoiding disk I/O.  Would memcached be the best solution here? Or would loading it into an in-memory SQLite DB be better?  Or loading it on app startup simply as an in-memory variable?