Redis
| Developer(s) | Salvatore Sanfilippo |
|---|---|
| Initial release | April 10, 2009 |
| Stable release | 2.4.8 / February 22, 2012 |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | ANSI C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Document-oriented database |
| License | BSD |
| Website | redis.io |
Redis is an open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store with optional durability. It is written in ANSI C. The development of Redis is sponsored by VMware.[1][2]
Contents |
[edit] Supported languages
Languages for which Redis bindings exist[3] include:
ActionScript, C, C++, C#, Clojure, Common Lisp, Erlang, Go, Haskell, haXe, Io, Java, server-side JavaScript (Node.js), Lua, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Pure Data, Python, Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk and Tcl.
[edit] Data model
In its outer layer, the Redis data model is a dictionary where keys are mapped to values. One of the main differences between Redis and other structured storage systems is that values are not limited to strings. In addition to strings, the following abstract data types are supported:
- Lists of strings
- Sets of strings (collections of non-repeating unsorted elements)
- Sorted sets of strings (collections of non-repeating elements ordered by a floating-point number called score)
- Hashes where keys and values are strings
The type of a value determines what operations (called commands) are available for the value itself. Redis supports high level atomic server side operations like intersection, union, and difference between sets and sorting of lists, sets and sorted sets.
[edit] Persistence
Redis typically holds the whole dataset in RAM. Versions up to 2.4 could be configured to use virtual memory[4] but this is now deprecated. Persistence is reached in two different ways: One is called snapshotting, and is a semi-persistent durability mode where the dataset is asynchronously transferred from memory to disk from time to time. Since version 1.1 the safer alternative is an append-only file (a journal) that is written as operations modifying the dataset in memory are processed. Redis is able to rewrite the append-only file in the background in order to avoid an indefinite growth of the journal.
[edit] Replication
Redis supports master-slave replication. Data from any Redis server can replicate to any number of slaves. A slave may be a master to another slave. This allows Redis to implement a single-rooted replication tree. Redis slaves are writable, permitting intentional and unintentional inconsistency between instances. The Publish/Subscribe feature is fully implemented, so a client of a slave may SUBSCRIBE to a channel and receive a full feed of messages PUBLISHed to the master, anywhere up the replication tree. Replication is useful for read (but not write) scalability or data redundancy.[5]
[edit] Performance
When the durability of data is not needed, the in-memory nature of Redis allows it to perform extremely well compared to database systems that write every change to disk before considering a transaction committed.[6] There is no notable speed difference between write and read operations.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Jeremy Zawodny, Redis: Lightweight key/value Store That Goes the Extra Mile, Linux Magazine, August 31, 2009
- Isabel Drost and Jan Lehnard (29 October 2009), Happenings: NoSQL Conference, Berlin, The H. Slides for the Redis presentation. Summary.
- Billy Newport (IBM): "Evolving the Key/Value Programming Model to a Higher Level" Qcon Conference 2009 San Francisco.
- ^ VMware: the new Redis home
- ^ VMWare: The Console: VMware hires key developer for Redis
- ^ Redis language bindings
- ^ Redis documentation "Virtual Memory", redis.io, accessed January 18, 2011.
- ^ http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/ReplicationHowto
- ^ "FAQ". http://redis.io/topics/faq.
