Redis as the primary data store?

On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfortunate that Redis has been stagnant on the persistence side since the virtual memory experiment ended up nowhere. It's a wonderful tool with so much potential as a primary data store, not merely as a smart cache. But people are bound to get hesitant about a data store if it offers no straightforward way to persist large amounts of data.<p>On the other hand, Redis was probably born 10 years ahead of its time. If and when we finally get to mass-produce persistent storage media with the speed of RAM and the capacity of HDD -- SSDs are getting there, but not quite yet, and we don't know when memristors will become commercially available -- Redis will be the most obvious database to run on it.

The previous link had some questions about performance and equivalence for in-memory use for redis vs. MongoDB.<p>I can tell you that we tried to make MongoDB do high write updates, and a 24 server cluster (8 shards with 2 replicas per shard) was unable to keep up due to the massively slow response times.<p>I replaced it with a single server running a twemproxy cluster of 4 redis instances and that single server was able to handle more than 10x the load.<p>So, there are many cases where using redis makes a lot more sense, even if it makes it complicated to maintain a persistence model.

<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511163" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511163</a>

From the article:<p><pre><code> &#62; These are the two primary reasons Redis sucks as a primary store: &#62; &#62; You have to be able to fit all your data in memory, and &#62; If your server fails between disk syncs you lose anything &#62; that was sitting in memory. </code></pre> Antirez explained how redis persistence works[0] some time ago. A good read, and only then one can evaluate the "sucks" part, for one's particular use case.<p>[0]: <a href="http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystified.html" rel="nofollow">http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystifie...</a>

RAM generally doesn't get more expensive by time, so might be the right time to do it.

They could switch to edis when it gets too expensive to keep everything in memory.