NoSQL

Reality 2.0 Episode 24: A Chat About Redis Labs (Podcast Transcript)

Katherine Druckman — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 15:40:07 +0000

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Yiftach Shoolman of Redis Labs about Redis, Open Source licenses, company culture and more.

Listen to the podcast here.

Katherine Druckman: Hey, Linux Journal readers, I am Katherine Druckman, joining you again for our awesome, cool podcast. As always, joining us is Doc Searls, our editor-in-chief. Our special guest this time is Yiftach Shoolman of Redis Labs. He is the CTO and co-founder, and he was kind enough to join us. We’ve talked a bit, in preparation for the podcast, about Redis Labs, but I wondered if you could just give us sort of an overview for the tiny fraction of the people listening that don’t know all about Redis Labs and Redis. If you could just give us a little brief intro, that’d be great.

Yiftach Shoolman: Thank you very much for hosting me, first. Redis is an extremely popular in-memory data structure database that’s used by many people as just a caching system, but many of them have shifted from just simple cache to a real database, even in the open source world. Just in terms of numbers, only on Docker Hub, Redis has been launched for almost 1.8 billion times, something like five million every day, so it’s extremely popular. It’s used everywhere. Redis Labs is the company behind the open source. When I say “behind the open source,” we sponsor, I would say, 99% of all the open source activities, if not 100%. We also have enterprise products, which is called Redis Enterprise.

It is available as a cloud service on all the public clouds, as well as a fully-managed Redis cloud service, as well as softwares that you can download and install everywhere. This is our story in general. The way we split between open source and commercial, which is today very tricky, is that we keep the Redis core as open-core BSD, by the way. On top of that, we added what we call enterprise layers that allows Redis to be deployed in an enterprise environment in the most scalable and highly available way. We have all the goodies that you need, including active-active, including data persistence layer, etc., all the boring stuff that the enterprise needs, in addition to that, a lot of security features. In addition to that, we extended Redis with what we call modules. Some of them were initially open source, and then we changed the license. This is probably the reason that you called me.

Katherine Druckman: Right. That was in the news, certainly.

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Webinar: Maximizing NoSQL Clusters for Large Data Sets

LJ Staff — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:05:32 +0000

by LJ Staff

This follow-on webcast to Reuven M. Lerner's well-received and widely acclaimed Geek Guide, "Take Control of Growing Redis NoSQL Server Clusters", will extend the discussion and get into the nuts and bolts of optimally maximizing your NoSQL clusters working with large data sets.

Reuven's deep knowledge of development and NoSQL clusters will combine with Brad Brech's intimate understanding of the intricacies of IBM's Power Systems and large data sets in a free-wheeling discussion that will answer all your questions on this complex subject. There will be time for Q & A as well. Please join us September 30 at 2:00PM EDT for this exciting, technical, deeply informative session.

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Database Integrity and Web Applications

Reuven Lerner — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000

by Reuven Lerner

Want to improve the integrity of your data? Place constraints in the database, as well as in your application.

NoSQL, the catchall phrase for non-relational databases, is all the rage among Web developers. However, it's somewhat unfair and unhelpful to use the term NoSQL to describe them, given the variety of technologies involved. Even so, there are some fundamental differences between traditional relational databases and their NoSQL counterparts. For one, as the name implies, NoSQL databases don't use the standard SQL query language, and use either their own SQL-like language (for example, MongoDB) or an object-oriented API. Another difference is the lack of two-dimensional tables; whereas SQL databases operate solely with such tables, NoSQL databases eschew them in favor of name-value pairs or hash-like objects. And finally, NoSQL databases typically lack the features that led to the development of relational databases, namely transactions and data integrity.

There's no doubt that the flexibility NoSQL databases offer is attractive on a number of levels. Just as I enjoy working with dynamic languages in which I don't have to declare my variables (or their types) before I use them, it's nice to be able to store objects in my database without having to define the object structure in advance. If I want to add a new field to my Person object, I just do so, and the database magically catches up.

At the same time, there are many cases when I want the database to be tough with me and enforce the integrity of my data. That is, I want to be sure that even if I have made a mistake in my application, or if a user enters a value that shouldn't be allowed, the database won't allow that bad data to be stored. And yes, I believe that it's good to have such checks at the database level, rather than just at the application level—not only because it provides an additional guard against corrupt data, but also because the database often is accessed directly, outside the application itself. I often have to do what I refer to as "database surgery" on applications that are running for my clients, and it's always reassuring to know I cannot make a change manually that would corrupt the data.

Readers of my column know I'm a fan of both Ruby on Rails and of PostgreSQL, and I often use them together on projects. However, because Rails originally was developed under MySQL, which lacks many of the data-integrity aspects of PostgreSQL, the standard Active Record package fails to include such items as foreign keys in its base implementation. This means that although Rails will support PostgreSQL out of the box, it doesn't provide support for foreign keys, let alone data-integrity checks.

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