Redis (data store) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Redis is an open-source

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

, networked, in-memory, key-value data store with optional durability. It is written in ANSI C

ANSI C

ANSI C refers to the family of successive standards published by the American National Standards Institute for the C programming language. Software developers writing in C are encouraged to conform to the standards, as doing so aids portability between compilers.-History and outlook:The first...

. The development of Redis is sponsored by VMware

VMware

VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....

Supported languages

Languages for which Redis bindings

Language binding

In computing, a binding from a programming language to a library or OS service is an API providing that service in the language.Many software libraries are written in systems programming languages such as C or C++...

exist include:

ActionScript

ActionScript

ActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. . It is a dialect of ECMAScript , and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of...

, C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, C#, Clojure

Clojure

Clojure |closure]]") is a recent dialect of the Lisp programming language created by Rich Hickey. It is a general-purpose language supporting interactive development that encourages a functional programming style, and simplifies multithreaded programming....

, Common Lisp

Common Lisp

Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

, Erlang, Go

Go (programming language)

Go is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc.The initial design of Go was started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was officially announced in November 2009. In May 2010, Rob Pike publicly stated that Go was being...

, Haskell

Haskell (programming language)

Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...

, haXe

HaXe

haXe is a versatile open-source high-level multiplatform programming language described on its website as a "universal language".It can produce:* Flash applications and games* Multi-platform client-side web applications* Apache CGI web applications...

, Io

Io (programming language)

Io is a pure object-oriented programming language inspired by Smalltalk, Self, Lua, Lisp, Act1, and NewtonScript. Io has a prototype-based object model similar to the ones in Self and NewtonScript, eliminating the distinction between instance and class. Like Smalltalk, everything is an object and...

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, server-side JavaScript

Server-side JavaScript

Server-side JavaScript refers to JavaScript that runs on the server-side. This term was coined because the language is predominantly used on the client-side, i.e. client-side JavaScript ....

(Node.js

Node.js

Node.js is a software system designed for writing highly-scalable internet applications, notably web servers.Programs are written in JavaScript, using event-driven, asynchronous I/O to minimize overhead and maximize scalability....

), Lua, Objective-C

Objective-C

Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.Today, it is used primarily on Apple's Mac OS X and iOS: two environments derived from the OpenStep standard, though not compliant with it...

, Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

, PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, Pure Data

Pure Data

Pure Data is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open source project with a large developer base working on new extensions to it. It is...

, Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

, Ruby

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

, Scala, Smalltalk

Smalltalk

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

and Tcl

Tcl

Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...

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

Structured storage

COM Structured Storage is a technology developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows operating system for storing hierarchical data within a single file...

systems is that values are not limited to strings

String (computer science)

In formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet....

. 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
Hash table
In computer science, a hash table or hash map is a data structure that uses a hash function to map identifying values, known as keys , to their associated values . Thus, a hash table implements an associative array...

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.

Persistence

Redis typically holds the whole dataset in RAM

Random-access memory

Random access memory is a form of computer data storage. Today, it takes the form of integrated circuits that allow stored data to be accessed in any order with a worst case performance of constant time. Strictly speaking, modern types of DRAM are therefore not random access, as data is read in...

. Versions up to 2.4 could be configured to use virtual memory

Virtual memory

In computing, virtual memory is a memory management technique developed for multitasking kernels. This technique virtualizes a computer architecture's various forms of computer data storage , allowing a program to be designed as though there is only one kind of memory, "virtual" memory, which...

but this is now deprecated. Persistence

Persistence (computer science)

Persistence in computer science refers to the characteristic of state that outlives the process that created it. Without this capability, state would only exist in RAM, and would be lost when this RAM loses power, such as a computer shutdown....

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

Journal (computing)

In computer storage, a journal is a chronological record of data processing operations that may be used to construct or reinstate an historical or alternative version of a computer system or computer file....

) 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.

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.

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. There is no notable speed difference between write and read operations.

External links