Redis becomes the most popular database on AWS as complex cloud application deployments surge

Open-source NoSQL in-memory database Redis is the most popular database in the world if, that is, your world is solely within Amazon Web Services. The knock to the egos of the database big boys has come from Sumo Logic, which provides monitoring software mostly focused on AWS, and can be explained by some of the peculiarities …

[J27]

Redis isn't a database, it's an in-memory key/value store. Also, you can't say "the most" anything with Sumo Logic's methodology, it only covers a very small percentage of Amazon's users.

Essentially, almost everything in this post is wrong. Redis is great on its own and doesn't need poorly-sourced "research" to prop it up.

[thames]

Redis does a lot more than just act as a key-value store. There are numerous instructions for sorting, filtering, and manipulating data. There are message queues, sets, publish/subscribe channels, and even a built in Lua interpreter to run scripts.

If you are looking into using it for anything, it's worth reading the full documentation to find out all it can do. I'm working on a project which uses it, and I'm not aware of anything else that is similar.

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are numerous instructions for sorting, filtering, and manipulating data. There are message queues, sets, publish/subscribe channels"

By that definition anything that stores data is a DB.

"and even a built in Lua interpreter to run scripts."

Oh great, Lua. The usual "lets use a relatively obscure language language to show how l33t and hardcore we are". Never mind that almost no one knows it. Have they not heard of Python or even JS?

[Robert Grant]

The best description I've heard of it is it's a host of distributed data structures. E.g. you can have a map, a list, a set, etc.

Mind you, "PostGreSQL"? :-)

[rcxb]

Redis isn't a database, it's an in-memory key/value store.

A key/value store most certainly is a database, just not a relational or SQL one. Venerable old BerkleyDB comes to mind.

And Redis isn't in-memory only. It has the option of persistence (writing to disk) if desired.

[NetBlackOps]

Does it allow you to store, retrieve, change, and delete information? It's a database. Been fifty years in this biz, so I've seen a ton of databases, and they're all over the damned place.

[andy 103]

I wouldn't use the phrase "poorly-sourced" when there are 2 errors in your first sentence. No, I'm afraid that Redis is very much a database and isn't limited to memory based storage since it can read/write to disk as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Redis is just a hashmap...

...with a Man-bun. #Fact.

[oliversalmon]

Monopoly?

"It kicks ass as an in-memory cache, which covers (I would guess) a very large % of its use case. It's as close to a monopoly in that segment as it gets"

Apart from Hazelcast, Oracle Coherence, Gridgain/Apache Ignite, Gemfire, Jboss Data Grid, etc, etc

[RM Myers]

This is a worthless article.

Good point. You should demand your money back.

[cyberdemon]

Re: This is a worthless article.

You owe me a new coffee.. And a keyboard.

[James Anderson]

What about sqlite

The worlds most used database — absolutely without question.

It’s installed and used in every iPhone, android phone, most IOT devices and used on thousands of web sights.

[Robert Grant]

Re: What about sqlite

Every copy of Windows 10 has it as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about sqlite

In that case, what about the excellent and well loved Windows Registry?

[James 47]

Redis is great, I like Redis and use it a lot.

We're better off running Redis as a standalone instance rather than through Elasticache. We run an instance on each core and shard requests to each core (from the client, not server), this saves a ton of money. We can also then use modules. There is a multi-threaded version of Redis, KeysDB, that we'll soon take a look at.

[Robert Grant]

Cloud Redis is very expensive. The Azure one requires the top tier price to get persistence.