Redis Guide: What Each Redis Data Type Should Be Used For
Salvatore Sanfilippo offers a very detailed answer to this question on StackOverflow. Just to give you a glimpse.
- strings:
- to avoid converting your already encoded data (JSON, HTML)
- bitmaps and in general random access arrays of bytes
- lists:
- when you are likely to touch only the extremes of the list: near tail, or near head
- capped collection of N items where usually we access just the top or bottom items, or when N is small
- sets:
- to check for existence or size of the collection in a very fast way
- random elements peeking or popping
- to represent relations (nb: sotrted sets might be more interesting)
- hashes:
- to represent objects, composed of fields and values
- to represent linked data structures, using references
- sorted sets:
- maintain ordered lists of unique elements
- describe relations
- paginate the list of items and to remember the ordering
- priority queues
In the list of top 5 mistakes to avoid when using Redis, I’ve listed not knowing all data types and their corresponding operations as being the top one. So I expect the examples above to come in very handy for a lot of new Redis users.
Original title and link: Redis Guide: What Each Redis Data Type Should Be Used For (©myNoSQL)
