[Abagail]

You could use mysql_query, although it's not recommended as it uses the main thread and halts the server until it's been executed. This might be ideal for some purposes, although you should use threading for most. If you're only loading this on server start, using query might be desired so nothing else happens until they've been loaded (Let me know if you want some examples).

Also, the loop is for going through all the rows that have been loaded. You're able to do it this way because the cache_ functions use the row index where i is the current index, e.g:

cache_get_field_content(i, ...