You can pretty well use it for anything you want to use it for. It's persistent, networked shared memory. It's powerful and flexible enough that I've used it a

You can pretty well use it for anything you want to use it for. It's persistent, networked shared memory. It's powerful and flexible enough that I've used it as a primary datastore for the back-end to a web/multi-platform app/service. I don't necessarily recommend that, but it does work and is blazing fast and extremely reliable. It's definitely some-assembly-required, though -- transactions aren't free, you have to do a little work yourself[1] (on the upside, you always know what it's doing). Also, it is intended to be used with the entire dataset in RAM. You can let it swap to some extent, but... don't. If your dataset is huge, you need something else. [1] Actually, this is less true post-2.6 with lua scripts. I should play with those more, the bulk of the code I wrote that uses Redis was built in the 2.0-2.2 timeframe.