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Talking about the broken API argument here. Also Redis is particularly useful exactly in other situations compared to what OP says. Leaderboards style use cases

Talking about the broken API argument here. Also Redis is particularly useful exactly in other situations compared to what OP says. Leaderboards style use cases with sorted sets are killer applications (super hard to model with SQL) of the data structure server thing. Apparently OP does not understand this and says "simple GET/SET" is what you should use Redis for. Redis has probabilistic data structures, the ability to implement complex queueing patterns, and so forth. That's where the value is. Otherwise we would still be just with Memcached without caring about Redis. Another killer app was Twitter initial use case (then they used it for pretty much everything): to cache latest N Tweets, using capped lists. I could continue forever. So OP argoment is flawed IMHO, for the above arguments, not fair. When you talk to students you need to make your homeworks. Really understand the system you are talking and provide a realistic image of it. Then, yes, if you want, criticize it as much as you want, with grounded arguments. You know what? I re-read this comment and it's embarassing I ever have to write this, because after 15 years of Redis history at such scale and popularity, pretty much everybody that was seriously exposed to Redis knows those stuff. Is tech culture really degraded so much that we have to restate the obvious? Do I really need to explain GET/SET is not exactly where Redis shines after 15 years of half the Internet used all the kind of Redis patterns?

memhole 2y ago
What are your thoughts about Rails switching to SQLite from Redis? I've only used Redis to store session data and cache app data. So my opinions are pretty limited and mostly positive. https://rubyonrails.org/2024/11/7/rails-8-no-paas-required https://rubyonrails.org/2024/11/7/rails-8-no-paas-required
- antirez 2y ago
  My feeling is that for their use case, it makes sense to have something vertical that just cover the needs of Rails. AFAIK SQLite has a RAM backend, so still you are not going to hit disk. Seems like a good idea to reduce system complexity, to me.
sureglymop 2y ago
Maybe this is a weird question but, knowing only some math and not redis, what is a sorted set and how is it different than a list/tuple?
- antirez 2y ago
  Sorted sets are abstract data structures were you insert elements into a set, but every element is associated with a floating point score. Elements are taken ordered inside the sorted sets, so you can ask for ranges, or a specific element rank (position), and so forth. It sounds like the (many) cases where Redis is the best idea to get started and deliver (see for instance the Instagram case, that used Redis for years while becoming bigger and bigger). Then as you understand you are at scale and need just XYZ, you may choose to implement XYZ inside your system in other ways and that's it.
  - sureglymop 2y ago
    Thank you for explaining it! I appreciate that.
nicoritschel 2y ago
I am grateful for Redis and I agree you pioneered a lot of data access patterns in production for a lot of people, myself included. I've used Redis for 10 years, at times for use cases as you mention, for real time feature engineering for ML as well. The API is just different compared to SQL, which is a downside for many. There's modern advancements in the space with IVM and more databases are supporting probabilistic data structures.
daneel_w 2y ago
> Is tech culture really degraded so much that we have to restate the obvious? Maybe, though the author of the article is known to be a little bit too opinionated, and unfortunately habitual with phrasing himself in a bombastic manner. The piece reads like a dramatic recap of the past year's sporting events, littered with irrelevant and disconnected references to lyrics and drama in the world of rap and hip hop. A "quirky and fun" journalistic abortion.
somat 2y ago
Now I have never used redis in this capacity but these sorted sets(a data structure that maintains it's sort as data is entered I assume) how is that different from "create index on player_score (score)"? that is, an index on the score column. which will create a data structure that maintains it's sorted nature as data is entered. My naive view is that you create a sorted set every time you define an index. that is, the opposite of "super hard to model with SQL"
- mistrial9 2y ago
  maybe it was a reference to two or three or N level deep nested tree structures. Those dont map as naturally using simple SQL relations.
to11mtm 2y ago
> I re-read this comment and it's embarassing I ever have to write this, because after 15 years of Redis history at such scale and popularity, pretty much everybody that was seriously exposed to Redis knows those stuff. Is tech culture really degraded so much that we have to restate the obvious? I know you wrote OG and did a lot of Redis but... Yes, Tech culture is that fucked. In my past job I was hired semi-specifically to deal with a concern, namely that their use case 'fit well with Kafka' but the latency for their case sucked at least as much as the API pain. (Yes I did something better. No, IDK if folks will ever see it). Now? Now I spend my days trying to 'paper-over' patterns that drive me to insanity just trying to make it work from a 'people need to learn why things work on a starship' level [0]. On a real level you didn't fail, Redis has lots of great patterns. On a -practical- level it's a shitshow because you now have lots of folks 'glue-gunning' the Redis API on use cases that probably need tweaking or aren't the right fit at all, alas they all worked off the same example on GH/SO/etc and then did their own "this wasn't even the right way to do this so I'm adding glue, what could possibly go wrong" case. (That said, Nats has decent stuff for this in form of KV CompareExchange style APIs, and I see the inspiration there, so that's something to feel good about.) [0] - Namely, if anyone has a good prompt for taking a photo of someone and doing img2img of 'Person in astronaut uniform preaching from an ivory tower', that would be a plus

memhole 2y ago

What are your thoughts about Rails switching to SQLite from Redis? I've only used Redis to store session data and cache app data. So my opinions are pretty limited and mostly positive. https://rubyonrails.org/2024/11/7/rails-8-no-paas-required https://rubyonrails.org/2024/11/7/rails-8-no-paas-required

antirez 2y ago
My feeling is that for their use case, it makes sense to have something vertical that just cover the needs of Rails. AFAIK SQLite has a RAM backend, so still you are not going to hit disk. Seems like a good idea to reduce system complexity, to me.

sureglymop 2y ago

Maybe this is a weird question but, knowing only some math and not redis, what is a sorted set and how is it different than a list/tuple?

antirez 2y ago
Sorted sets are abstract data structures were you insert elements into a set, but every element is associated with a floating point score. Elements are taken ordered inside the sorted sets, so you can ask for ranges, or a specific element rank (position), and so forth. It sounds like the (many) cases where Redis is the best idea to get started and deliver (see for instance the Instagram case, that used Redis for years while becoming bigger and bigger). Then as you understand you are at scale and need just XYZ, you may choose to implement XYZ inside your system in other ways and that's it.
- sureglymop 2y ago
  Thank you for explaining it! I appreciate that.

nicoritschel 2y ago

I am grateful for Redis and I agree you pioneered a lot of data access patterns in production for a lot of people, myself included. I've used Redis for 10 years, at times for use cases as you mention, for real time feature engineering for ML as well. The API is just different compared to SQL, which is a downside for many. There's modern advancements in the space with IVM and more databases are supporting probabilistic data structures.

daneel_w 2y ago

> Is tech culture really degraded so much that we have to restate the obvious? Maybe, though the author of the article is known to be a little bit too opinionated, and unfortunately habitual with phrasing himself in a bombastic manner. The piece reads like a dramatic recap of the past year's sporting events, littered with irrelevant and disconnected references to lyrics and drama in the world of rap and hip hop. A "quirky and fun" journalistic abortion.

somat 2y ago

Now I have never used redis in this capacity but these sorted sets(a data structure that maintains it's sort as data is entered I assume) how is that different from "create index on player_score (score)"? that is, an index on the score column. which will create a data structure that maintains it's sorted nature as data is entered. My naive view is that you create a sorted set every time you define an index. that is, the opposite of "super hard to model with SQL"

mistrial9 2y ago
maybe it was a reference to two or three or N level deep nested tree structures. Those dont map as naturally using simple SQL relations.

to11mtm 2y ago

> I re-read this comment and it's embarassing I ever have to write this, because after 15 years of Redis history at such scale and popularity, pretty much everybody that was seriously exposed to Redis knows those stuff. Is tech culture really degraded so much that we have to restate the obvious? I know you wrote OG and did a lot of Redis but... Yes, Tech culture is that fucked. In my past job I was hired semi-specifically to deal with a concern, namely that their use case 'fit well with Kafka' but the latency for their case sucked at least as much as the API pain. (Yes I did something better. No, IDK if folks will ever see it). Now? Now I spend my days trying to 'paper-over' patterns that drive me to insanity just trying to make it work from a 'people need to learn why things work on a starship' level [0]. On a real level you didn't fail, Redis has lots of great patterns. On a -practical- level it's a shitshow because you now have lots of folks 'glue-gunning' the Redis API on use cases that probably need tweaking or aren't the right fit at all, alas they all worked off the same example on GH/SO/etc and then did their own "this wasn't even the right way to do this so I'm adding glue, what could possibly go wrong" case. (That said, Nats has decent stuff for this in form of KV CompareExchange style APIs, and I see the inspiration there, so that's something to feel good about.) [0] - Namely, if anyone has a good prompt for taking a photo of someone and doing img2img of 'Person in astronaut uniform preaching from an ivory tower', that would be a plus