I decided to wrap this functionality in a component because when you have several forms in a view and each one relates to a different controller it's much easier to point the form to it's controller respective action and redirect back to the originating view.

Most common way to access data is a database. Most common way to speed this up - Memcached. As a quite young CakePHP developer I had a bit of headache "how to cache queries effectively?". Now I know the way, so I share. Feel free to disagree, upgrade and so on.