The Little Redis Book

Over the last couple years, the techniques and tools used for persisting and querying data have grown at an incredible pace. While it’s safe to say that relational databases aren’t going anywhere, we can also say that the ecosystem around data is never going to be the same.

Of all the new tools and solutions, for me, Redis has been the most exciting. Why? First because it’s unbelievably easy to learn. Hours is the right unit to use when talking about length of time it takes to get comfortable with Redis. Secondly, it solves a specific set of problems while at the same time being quite generic. What exactly does that mean? Redis doesn’t try to be all things to all data. As you get to know Redis, it’ll become increasingly evident what does and what does not belong in it. And when it does, as a developer, it’s a great experience.

While you can build a complete system using Redis only, I think most people will find that it supplements their more generic data solution – whether that be a traditional relational database, a document-oriented system, or something else. It’s the kind of solution you use to implement specific features. In that way, it’s similar to an indexing engine. You wouldn’t build your entire application on Lucene. But when you need good search, it’s a much better experience – for both you and your users. Of course, the similarities between Redis and indexing engines end there.

The goal of this book is to build the foundation you’ll need to master Redis. We’ll focus on learning Redis’ five data structures and look at various data modeling approaches. We’ll also touch on some key administrative details and debugging techniques.