Chapter 8
Redis

Redis is like grease. It’s most often used to lubricate moving parts and keep them working smoothly by reducing friction and speeding up their overall function. Whatever the machinery of your system, it could very well be improved with a bit poured over it. Sometimes the answer to your problem is simply a judicious use of more Redis.

First released in 2009, Redis (REmote DIctionary Service) is a simple-to-use key-value store with a sophisticated set of commands. And when it comes to speed, Redis is hard to beat. Reads are fast and writes are even faster, handling upwards of 100,000 SET operations per second by some benchmarks. Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka antirez) refers to his project as a “data structure server” to capture its nuanced handling of complex datatypes and other features. Exploring this super-fast, more-than-just-a-key-value-store will round out our view of the modern database landscape.