Redis (and Jedis) – delightfully simple and focused NoSQL by Ashwin Jayaprakash.
A very nice reminder that Redis may be the solution you need.
Redis is an open source NoSQL project that I had not paid much attention to. Largely because it didn’t seem very special at the time nor did it have a good persistence and paging story. Also, there is/was so much noise out there and the loudest among them being Memcached, Hadoop, Cassandra, Voldemort, Riak, MongoDB etc that it slipped my mind.
Last weekend I thought I’d give Redis another try. This time I just wanted to see Redis for what it is and not compare it with other solutions. So, as it says on the site:
Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.
Seemed interesting enough to warrant another look. There are so many projects that need:
- Simple, fast, light
- In-memory (with optional checkpointing)
- Fault tolerant / Sharded / Distributed
- Shared access from many processes and machines
- Some real data structures instead of just wimpy key-value
- Flexible storage format – without needing crummy layers to hide/overcome limitations
- Clean Java API
So, I downloaded the Windows port of Redis and Jedis JAR for the Java API.
- Unzip Redis Windows zip file
- Copy the Jedis JAR file
- Go to the 64bit or 32bit folder and start “redis-server.exe”
- Write a simple Java program that uses Jedis to talk to the Redis server
- That’s it