Why every Developer should have Redis
January 12th, 2012 — — Permalink
Queues, counters and polling
How many times have you modelled a queue in SQL?
What about event counters?
Let's not even get started on polling for changes...
Since we started using Redis we've noticed that most of our 'hard' modelling problems in SQL will fit into a Redis construct really easily:
- Queues - try a list or a sorted set
- Counters - a key and using incr/decr work nicely
- Polling - Pub/sub or blocking pops on lists
Realising this - and using it - has made a lot of our code far simpler and faster.
Don't bin SQL - it's great for relational modelling. Be familiar with Redis too - it's far better for when you want non-trivial types (and it's really fast).
