anope 1.7 and the upcoming stable 1.8 will not have this feature. it is something that is planned for the next phase though, but i have no clue when you can be expecting that.... not anytime soon at least
My suggestion is that an option be created where everything can be run off live MySQL queries rather than being "cached" into files
this is not true... the .db files are being used in the same way as the mysql is being used.. to store data in between restarts or to keep backups. just like the mysql database, the .db files are not being changed everytime someone changes his pass or so. the .db's are - as far as i know - like mysql only being used to write to while anope s running, the database anope works with is completely loaded in the memory.
as for slowing it down, there has to be a huge difference between doing a mysql query or just looking something up in the memory or cache... dunno how that s gonna solved, maybe by using multiple threads or so, don't know, but the mysql support you are looking for is scheduled for the next branch, which i think will be 2.0...
there is a way to do what you are looking for with current branch though, but i have never tried it.
take a look at the xmlrpc module... Trystan has an example here:
http://www.nomadinc.net/mymods/files/nomadxmlrpc.tar.gz