Which one to use Hset or HMSet in Redis? - redis

I am kind of new to Redis. I am just trying to store values in Redis using the HashSet method available using StackExchange.Redis.StrongName assembly (Lets say I have 4000 items). Is it better to store the 4000 items individually (using HSet ) or shall I pass a dictionary (using HMSet) so it will call only Redis server call is required but a huge amount of data. Which one is better?
Thanks in Advance

HMSET has been deprecated as of redis 4.0.0 in favor of using HSET with multiple key/value pairs:
https://redis.io/commands/hset
https://redis.io/commands/hmset
Performance will be O(n)

TL;DR A single call is "better" in terms of performance.
Taking into consideration #dizzyf's answer about HMSET's deprecation, the question becomes "should I use a lot of small calls instead of one big one?". Because there is an overhead to process every command, it is usually preferred to "batch" calls together to reduce the price.
Some commands in Redis are varidiac, a.k.a dynamic arity, meaning they can accept one or more values to eliminate multiple calls. That said, overloading a single call with a huge amount of arguments is also not the best practice - that typically leads to massive memory allocations and blocks the server from serving other requests during its processing.
I would approach this by dividing the values to constant-sized "batches" - 100 is a good start, but you can always tune it afterwards - and sending each such "batch" in a single HSET key field1 value1 ... field100 value1000 call.
Pro tip: if your Redis client supports it, you can use pipelining to make everything more responsive ("better"?).

Related

String vs Hash for string type? Hash will have only one key instead of many

For example, I see many people are doing something like the following:
> set data:1000 "some string 1"
> set data:1001 "some string 2"
But what about using a hash to minimize the number of keys?
> hset data 1000 "some string 1"
> hset data 1001 "some string 2"
In the second way, it will only create one data key instead of creating many keys in the first way.
Which way is recommended?
I just see some people and tutorial are doing hset data:10 01 xxx. This is actually not related to my question. My question is simply asking what it's recommended between set data:1001 xxx and hset data 1001 xxx.
And I don't plan to modify hash-max-zipmap-entries and hash-max-zipmap-value. That means the hash will exceed the two values eventually. In such a config, are the two ways the same? or Which way is recommended?
Reasons to use strings:
you need per value timeouts
the values are semantically isolated
you're on cluster and want the values to be sharded over different nodes to spread load (sharding is based on the key)
Reasons to use hashes:
you want to be able to purge all of them at once (del/unlink), or have a timeout that impacts all of those values at once
you want to be able to enumerate them (prefer hscan/hgetall over scan/keys)
slightly better memory usage on the keys themselves
the values are semantically related
it is OK for all the values to be on the same node (whether single-server or cluster)
This all depends on the tradeoffs you want to support. In general, using hashes will have a smaller memory footprint than using simple keys. In fact, it is about an order of magnitude less memory. And access to hash values is constant time. So, if you are using redis simply as a key-value store, then hashes are way more efficient than simple keys.
However, you will want to use simple keys if you need to support expiration, keyspace notifications, etc, then you will need to use simple keys.
Just be careful to tweak the values for hash-max-zipmap-entries and hash-max-zipmap-value in your redis.conf in order to ensure that hashes are treated correctly for your environment.
You can read all about the details in the memory optimization section of the documentation.

Which approach is better when using Redis?

I'm facing following problem:
I wan't to keep track of tasks given to users and I want to store this state in Redis.
I can do:
1) create list called "dispatched_tasks" holding many objects (username, task)
2) create many (potentialy thousands) lists called dispatched_tasks:username holding usually few objects (task)
Which approach is better? If I only thought of my comfort, I would choose the second one, as from time to time I will have to search for particular user tasks, and this second approach gives this for free.
But how about Redis? Which approach will be more performant?
Thanks for any help.
Redis supports different kinds of data structures as shown here. There are different approaches you can take:
Scenario 1:
Using a list data type, your list will contain all the task/user combination for your problem. However, accessing and deleting a task runs in O(n) time complexity (it has to traverse the list to get to the element). This can have an impact in performance if your user has a lot of tasks.
Using sets:
Similar to lists, but you can add/delete/check for existence in O(1) and sets elements are unique. So if you add another username/task that already exists, it won't add it.
Scenario 2:
The data types do not change. The only difference is that there will be a lot more keys in redis, which in can increase the memory footprint.
From the FAQ:
What is the maximum number of keys a single Redis instance can hold? and what the max number of elements in a Hash, List, Set, Sorted
Set?
Redis can handle up to 232 keys, and was tested in practice to handle
at least 250 million keys per instance.
Every hash, list, set, and sorted set, can hold 232 elements.
In other words your limit is likely the available memory in your
system.
What's the Redis memory footprint?
To give you a few examples (all obtained using 64-bit instances):
An empty instance uses ~ 3MB of memory. 1 Million small Keys ->
String Value pairs use ~ 85MB of memory. 1 Million Keys -> Hash
value, representing an object with 5 fields, use ~ 160 MB of
memory. To test your use case is trivial using the
redis-benchmark utility to generate random data sets and check with
the INFO memory command the space used.

Redis PFADD to check a exists-in-set query

I have a requirement to process multiple records from a queue. But due to some external issues the items may sporadically occur multiple times.
I need to process items only once
What I planned to use is PFADD into redis every record ( as a md5sum) and then see if that returns success. If that shows no increment then the record is a duplicate else process the record.
This seems pretty straightforward , but I am getting too many false positives while using PFADD
Is there a better way to do this ?
Being the probabilistic data structure that it is, Redis' HyperLogLog exhibits 0.81% standard error. You can reduce (but never get rid of) the probability for false positives by using multiple HLLs, each counting a the value of a different hash function on your record.
Also note that if you're using a single HLL there's no real need to hash the record - just PFADD as is.
Alternatively, use a Redis Set to keep all the identifiers/hashes/records and have 100%-accurate membership tests with SISMEMBER. This approach requires more (RAM) resources as you're storing each processed element, but unless your queue is really huge that shouldn't be a problem for a modest Redis instance. To keep memory consumption under control, switch between Sets according to the date and set an expiry on the Set keys (another approach is to use a single Sorted Set and manually remove old items from it by keeping their timestamp in the score).
In general in distributed systems you have to choose between processing items either :
at most once
at least once
Processing something exactly-once would be convenient however this is generally impossible.
That being said there could be acceptable workarounds for your specific use case, and as you suggest storing the items already processed could be an acceptable solution.
Be aware though that PFADD uses HyperLogLog, which is fast and scales but is approximate about the count of the items, so in this case I do not think this is what you want.
However if you are fine with having a small probability of errors, the most appropriate data structure here would be a Bloom filter (as described here for Redis), which can be implemented in a very memory-efficient way.
A simple, efficient, and recommended solution would be to use a simple redis key (for instance a hash) storing a boolean-like value ("0", "1" or "true", "false") for instance with the HSET or SET with the NX option instruction. You could also put it under a namespace if you wish to. It has the added benefit of being able to expire keys also.
It would avoid you to use a set (not the SET command, but rather the SINTER, SUNION commands), which doesn't necessarily work well with Redis cluster if you want to scale to more than one node. SISMEMBER is still fine though (but lacks some features from hashes such as time to live).
If you use a hash, I would also advise you to pick a hash function that has fewer chances of collisions than md5 (a collision means that two different objects end up with the same hash).
An alternative approach to the hash would be to assign an uuid to every item when putting it in the queue (or a squuid if you want to have some time information).

Correct modeling in Redis for writing single entity but querying multiple

I'm trying to convert data which is on a Sql DB to Redis. In order to gain much higher throughput because it's a very high throughput. I'm aware of the downsides of persistence, storage costs etc...
So, I have a table called "Users" with few columns. Let's assume: ID, Name, Phone, Gender
Around 90% of the requests are Writes. to update a single row.
Around 10% of the requests are Reads. to get 20 rows in each request.
I'm trying to get my head around the right modeling of this in order to get the max out of it.
If there were only updates - I would use Hashes.
But because of the 10% of Reads I'm afraid it won't be efficient.
Any suggestions?
Actually, the real question is whether you need to support partial updates.
Supposing partial update is not required, you can store your record in a blob associated to a key (i.e. string datatype). All write operations can be done in one roundtrip, since the record is always written at once. Several read operations can be done in one rountrip as well using the MGET command.
Now, supposing partial update is required, you can store your record in a dictionary associated to a key (i.e. hash datatype). All write operations can be done in one roundtrip (even if they are partial). Several read operations can also be done in one roundtrip provided HGETALL commands are pipelined.
Pipelining several HGETALL commands is a bit more CPU consuming than using MGET, but not that much. In term of latency, it should not be significantly different, except if you execute hundreds of thousands of them per second on the Redis instance.

What is the conventional way to store objects in a sorted set in redis?

What is the most convenient/fast way to implement a sorted set in redis where the values are objects, not just strings.
Should I just store object id's in the sorted set and then query every one of them individually by its key or is there a way that I can store them directly in the sorted set, i.e. must the value be a string?
It depends on your needs, if you need to share this data with other zsets/structures and want to write the value only once for every change, you can put an id as the zset value and add a hash to store the object. However, it implies making additionnal queries when you read data from the zset (one zrange + n hgetall for n values in the zset), but writing and synchronising the value between many structures is cheap (only updating the hash corresponding to the value).
But if it is "self-contained", with no or few accesses outside the zset, you can serialize to a chosen format (JSON, MESSAGEPACK, KRYO...) your object and then store it as the value of your zset entry. This way, you will have better performance when you read from the zset (only 1 query with O(log(N)+M), it is actually pretty good, probably the best you can get), but maybe you will have to duplicate the value in other zsets / structures if you need to read / write this value outside, which also implies maintaining synchronisation by hand on the value.
Redis has good documentation on performance of each command, so check what queries you would write and calculate the total cost, so that you can make a good comparison of these two options.
Also, don't forget that redis comes with optimistic locking, so if you need pessimistic (because of contention for instance) you will have to do it by hand and/or using lua scripts. If you need a lot of sync, the first option seems better (less performance on read, but still good, less queries and complexity on writes), but if you have values that don't change a lot and memory space is not a problem, the second option will provide better performance on reads (you can duplicate the value in redis, synchronize the values periodically for instance).
Short answer: Yes, everything must be stored as a string
Longer answer: you can serialize your object into any text-based format of your choosing. Most people choose MsgPack or JSON because it is very compact and serializers are available in just about any language.