Any chance I can use a MySQL database table to do a lookup to return the url to rewrite to?

Let me explain the situation first...

Magento utilizes rewrite rules heavily but does the majority of the rewrite within the Front controller. The problem is that it is VERY in-efficient and a store with more than 10,000 products is severely delay. But, all information is referenced in a table 'core_url_rewrite' so my though it so do the lookup first in Nginx and hand off to Magento with the non-seo url.

Any idea/though would be GREATLY appreciated.

Brian Tafoya
Prema Solutions
www.premasolutions.com


Current environment:

Two dedicated servers, one web, one db, both with ridiculous amounts of memory and high speed drives.

nginx
php-fpm
php 5.3.3
apc