"Making the Case for Redis" by mtodd

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:55:00 EST

Most database-backed applications, especially Ruby applications written in Rails do fine with a SQL Database, like MySQL. Adam Wiggins of Heroku does a great job explaining how SQL Databases are an Overapplied Solution. There are definitely a few cases we’ve seen where a NoSQL solution like Redis can really shine.

At Highgroove, we’ve got several projects utilizing the Redis key-value store. Here are a few reasons you might want to look into Redis:

1) ”Data is frequently written, infrequently read” – if you are making tons of writes and MySQL can’t keep up, Redis has been clocked at 110000 SETs (the INSERT equivalent) per second!

2) ”Data can be expired” – if you have data that can be expired on a regular basis, over time, or explicitly, like stats, logs, and session data, Redis can explicitly expire whole keys or quickly trim large lists of data in no time.

3) ”Data is a collection of COUNTs, or SUMs of other data.” – if you have ever written an UPDATE statement that adds +1 to a record, you probably know that it is quite expensive, and could possibly be wrong. Redis has built in support for incrementing and decrementing values, quickly.

We love SQL Databases, so you won’t see us abandoning them any time soon, but we enjoy adding tools like Redis to our toolbelt.

More Information on Redis:

Redis Project Page – http://code.google.com/p/redis/

Redis (wikipedia entry) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_)

A Collection of Redis Use Cases – http://www.paperplanes.de/2010/2/16/a_collection_of_redis_use_cases.html

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"Making the Case for Redis" by mtodd