Alternatives to Nested Structures in Redis?

Question

I keep running into cases where I have more complicated information to store than what can fit into any of Redis' simple data structures. I still want to use Redis, but I was wondering if there are any standard alternatives people use when ideally they'd like to use a nested structure?

Answer 1

You have basically two strategies:

• you can serialize your complex objects and store them as strings. We suggest json or msgpack for the serialization format. This is easy enough to manipulate from most client-side languages. If server-side access is needed, then a server-side Lua script can easily encode/decode such objects since Redis is compiled with msgpack and json support for Lua.

• you can split your objects in different keys. Instead of storing user:id and a complex data structure to this id, you can store several keys such as user:id, user:id:address_list, user:id:document_lists, etc ... If you need atomicity, pipelining MULTI/EXEC blocks can be used to guarantee the data consistency, and aggregate the roundtrips.

See a simple example in this answer:

Will the LPUSH command work on a record that was initialized from JSON?

Finally, Redis is not a document oriented database. If you really have a lot of complex documents, perhaps you could be better served by solutions such as MongoDB, ArangoDB, CouchDB, Couchbase, etc ...