3 ms·
On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfortunate that Redis has been stagnant on the persistence side since the virtual memory experiment ended up nowhere. It's
by kijin 14y ago
On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfortunate that Redis has been stagnant on the persistence side since the virtual memory experiment ended up nowhere. It's a wonderful tool with so much potential as a primary data store, not merely as a smart cache. But people are bound to get hesitant about a data store if it offers no straightforward way to persist large amounts of data.
On the other hand, Redis was probably born 10 years ahead of its time. If and when we finally get to mass-produce persistent storage media with the speed of RAM and the capacity of HDD -- SSDs are getting there, but not quite yet, and we don't know when memristors will become commercially available -- Redis will be the most obvious database to run on it.
- amock 14y agoOnce we get the kind of storage you're talking about Redis will be much less interesting since its big difference is that it stores everything in RAM. If that is no longer an advantage then Redis will become a much more niche tool because you'll be able to get similar speeds out of other databases when they aren't constrained by disk IO.
- kijin 14y agoTheoretically, you may be right. But in practice, Redis was designed from the ground up with data structures that are heavily optimized for RAM, whereas traditional databases like PostgreSQL are heavily optimized for disk storage with RAM buffers. Although every database will benefit from faster storage, it will take at least several months, but more likely a few years, to modify traditional databases to take full advantage of the new paradigm. Redis on the other hand will probably require much fewer modifications.