This chapter covers
Redis is an in-memory remote database that offers high performance, replication, and a unique data model to produce a platform for solving problems. By supporting five different types of data structures, Redis accommodates a wide variety of problems that can be naturally mapped into what Redis offers, allowing you to solve your problems without having to perform the conceptual gymnastics required by other databases. Additional features like replication, persistence, and client-side sharding allow Redis to scale from a convenient way to prototype a system, all the way up to hundreds of gigabytes of data and millions of requests per second.
My first experience with Redis was at a company that needed to search a database of client contacts. The search needed to find contacts by name, email address, location, and phone number. The system was written to use a SQL database that performed a series of queries that would take 10–15 seconds to find matches among 60,000 clients. After spending a week learning the basics of what was available in Redis, I built a search engine that could filter and sort on all of those fields and more, returning responses within 50 milliseconds. In just a few weeks of effort involving testing and making the system production-worthy, performance improved 200 times. By reading this book, you can learn about many of the tips, tricks, and well-known problems that have been solved using Redis.
This chapter will help you to understand where Redis fits within the world of databases, and how Redis is useful for solving problems in multiple contexts (communicating between different components and languages, and more). Remaining chapters will show a variety of problems and their solutions using Redis.
Now that you know a bit about how I started using Redis and what we’ll cover, let’s talk more about what Redis is, and how it’s probably something you’ve always needed, even though you didn’t realize it.
Installing Redis and Python Look in appendix A for quick and dirty installation instructions for both Redis and Python.
Using Redis from other Languages Though not included in this book, source code for all examples possible will be provided in Ruby, Java, and JavaScript (Node.js) shortly after all chapters have been completed. For users of the Spring framework, the author of Spring Data’s Redis interface, Costin Leau, has teamed up with Redis author Salvatore Sanfilippo to produce a one-hour introduction for using Spring with Redis available at https://www.springsource.org/spring-data/redis.
