Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Redis -- key pair and replication

DBAs seem to be getting hit over the head with the NoSQL message while trying to keep their SQL systems going. SQL does have its place in the world1 and much of the NoSQL push seems to be a way to get past some of SQL's limitations. But simply moving from a proven technology and infrastructure to something new with fad overtones is not going to make life easier for Joe Average DBA. Redis is one of those project that will get notice from a lot of DBAs looking for a very fast key-value datastore.

Redis keeps the dataset in memory but writes to disk asynchronously and reloaded when Redis is restarted. Or the data can be saved each time a command is issued or on schedule to minimize data loss.

Redis also has master-slave replication and setup consists of a 'slave of x.x.x.x' line in the slave's config file. And is the only trivial thing about Redis.

The Command Reference shows a lot of thought and hard work has gone into Redis. Redis has a lot to offer Joe Average DBA without making him forsake his comfortable base.


  1. SQL is not going away. And not like COBOL, FORTRAN or I Love Lucy not going away. SQL solves too many problems to be pushed aside. It does have limitations but cleaver engineering will mitigate them.

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