When we discussed sharding HASHes, I briefly mentioned that if we’re storing short sharded HASHes as a way of reducing memory use. But let’s say that we wanted to store a short fixed amount of information for sequential IDs. Can we use even less memory than sharded HASHes?
In this section, we’ll use sharded Redis STRINGs to store location information for large numbers of users with sequential IDs, and discuss how to perform aggregate counts over this stored data. This example shows how we can use sharded Redis STRINGs to store, for example, location information for users on Twitter.
Before we start storing our data, we need to revisit four commands that’ll let us efficiently pack and update STRINGs in Redis: GETRANGE, SETRANGE, GETBIT, and SETBIT. The GETRANGE command lets us read a substring from a stored STRING. SETRANGE will let us set the data stored at a substring of the larger STRING. Similarly, GETBIT will fetch the value of a single bit in a STRING, and SETBIT will set an individual bit. With these four commands, we can use Redis STRINGs to store counters, fixed-length strings, Booleans, and more in as compact a format as is possible without compression. With our brief review out of the way, let’s talk about what information we’ll store.
