Coding patterns on Docs

Bulk loading

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bulk loading is the process of loading Redis with a large amount of pre-existing data. Ideally, you want to perform this operation quickly and efficiently. This document describes some strategies for bulk loading data in Redis.

Bulk loading using the Redis protocol

Using a normal Redis client to perform bulk loading is not a good idea for a few reasons: the naive approach of sending one command after the other is slow because you have to pay for the round trip time for every command. It is possible to use pipelining, but for bulk loading of many records you need to write new commands while you read replies at the same time to make sure you are inserting as fast as possible.

Distributed Locks with Redis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Distributed locks are a very useful primitive in many environments where different processes must operate with shared resources in a mutually exclusive way.

There are a number of libraries and blog posts describing how to implement a DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) with Redis, but every library uses a different approach, and many use a simple approach with lower guarantees compared to what can be achieved with slightly more complex designs.

Secondary indexing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Redis is not exactly a key-value store, since values can be complex data structures. However it has an external key-value shell: at API level data is addressed by the key name. It is fair to say that, natively, Redis only offers primary key access. However since Redis is a data structures server, its capabilities can be used for indexing, in order to create secondary indexes of different kinds, including composite (multi-column) indexes.

Redis patterns example

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This article describes the design and implementation of a very simple Twitter clone written using PHP with Redis as the only database. The programming community has traditionally considered key-value stores as a special purpose database that couldn't be used as a drop-in replacement for a relational database for the development of web applications. This article will try to show that Redis data structures on top of a key-value layer are an effective data model to implement many kinds of applications.