Simon Willison’s Weblog

Comprehensive notes from my three hour Redis tutorial

Last week I presented two talks at the inaugural NoSQL Europe conference in London. The first was presented with Matthew Wall and covered the ways in which we have been exploring NoSQL at the Guardian. The second was a three hour workshop on Redis, my favourite piece of software to have the NoSQL label applied to it.

I’ve written about Redis here before, and it has since earned a place next to MySQL/PostgreSQL and memcached as part of my default web application stack. Redis makes write-heavy features such as real-time statistics feasible for small applications, while effortlessly scaling up to handle larger projects as well. If you haven’t tried it out yet, you’re sorely missing out.

For the workshop, I tried to give an overview of each individual Redis feature along with detailed examples of real-world problems that the feature can help solve. I spent the past day annotating each slide with detailed notes, and I think the result makes a pretty good stand-alone tutorial. Here’s the end result:

Redis tutorial slides and notes

In unrelated news, Nat and I both completed the first ever Brighton Marathon last weekend, in my case taking 4 hours, 55 minutes and 17 seconds. Sincere thanks to everyone who came out to support us—until the race I had never appreciated how important the support of the spectators is to keep going to the end. We raised £757 for the Have a Heart children’s charity. Thanks in particular to Clearleft who kindly offered to match every donation.