Karl Katzke

Redis is an interesting database project that reminds me a bit of a low-cost-of-entry hadoop/couchDB/simpleDB. “MySQL is to Oracle as Redis is to couchDB.”

It’s a simple key/value database that keeps everything in RAM but writes to disk occasionally, sort of the way MySQL works but without the whole overhead of SQL. So, kind of like the bastard stepchild of Tokyo Cabinet and memcached.

Frankly, I’m not sure I buy the justification for needing to keep everything in RAM. It makes it easy in the short term, but in the long term as your dataset grows, it becomes a pain in the ass to store even 32GB of data. With intelligent caching on a dataset, you should easily be able to saturate a gigabit connection even while doing computations. And there’s plenty of implementations (even commercial ones) of Tuple Space already.

Redis *does* seem to be the new cool kid on the block, though. Who knows, maybe it’ll be the next MySQL. You know, “Hey, kid, get a real database!”