When to use transients, when not to?

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I’m using WordPress and developed some site-specific plugins for it, additionally my theme is customized to fit the requirements of the plugins in the backend.

The last days I fiddled with transients in WordPress. In some tutorials they’re saying “If your’re using custom queries and their results are cachable: Use a transient“. Sounds good but I’m wondering when to use transients to get a real advantage.
I mean, even when using transients there have to be at least two queries in the background, haven’t it? The first one for checking the validity, second one for the transient itself.

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So is it really useful to use a transient i.e. for a custom WP_Query?
Thanks a lot for your help and thoughts.

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  1. Seems fairly straightforward. It’s a literal class helper that allows you to store objects in a ‘memcache’ type fashion. You first set the transient

    function do_something_here($callback_param = 'value'){
  $key = 'do_something_' . $callback_param;//set the name of our transient equal to the value of the callback param being passed in the function.
  $my_query = get_transient($myKey);  //if we've stored this request before, then use it.
  if($my_query !=== false){
    //we found a previous existing version of this query. let's use it.
    return $my_query;
  }else{
    //it doesn't exist, we need to build the transient.
    //do our database querying here, global $wpdb; etc
    //We are going to pretend our returned variable is 'george'
    $value = george;
    $length = 60*60*24; //how long do we want the transient to exist? 1 day here.
    set_transient($key, $value, $length);
    return $value;
  }
}

    Now that we have created our trigger and bound it to the name of ‘$key’, we can access it anytime by using the exact value that key implies (which we declared earlier).

    echo 'I wanted to do something, so : ' . do_something('value') . ' is what i did! ';

    By utilizing this format you can hold queries in a ‘cache’ like world and use them to generate your responses. This is similar in a way to using ‘trigger’ events in MySql. Infact, this is a PORTION of a TECHNIQUE commonly referred to as long polling.