The point of this article is that Redis cannot be the "one true datastore". By "one true datastore", he means that Redis is the only data store you need in the stack, because it has an append mode that persists data in memory to disk.

The author's mistake is that he is setting up a strawman argument. I've yet to hear Redis claiming to be a end all be all solution for data storage. In fact, it would make sense that most production environments use Redis as the non-persistent cache layer backed by an ACID compliant datastore for the time being.

The author's second point is that Redis fails "at scale in production environments". I'm curious to see some examples here of production Redis failing and I'd like to know how those companies were using Redis. Either way, the scalability debate should wait until 2.2 is released, because 2.2 is supposed to address primarily multi-server Redis instances.

I think the main problem is just believing that there can be "one true datastore". Different technologies excel at different things. You pick what you want your app to do, and then take a look at the tools given to you and pick the best one for the job.

Redis happens to be a great choice for many things, but ACID compliant storage is not really one of them at the moment, although I suppose you could set up 2 Redis instances, one for fast in-memory usage and one that syncs to disk on every command for now.

From my experience, Redis is great for the following:

- Session storage

- basic LRU cache

- Publish / subscribe

- key value store where you want to manipulate data in the form of common data structures

- simple / medium complex queries

Redis is not good for:

- ACID compliant data storage AND fast in-memory access at the same time (the holy grail)

- Complex sql-like queries

Right now, if you try to make Redis persistent in the event of a crash (fsync constantly), you will get a performance hit because the writes to disk will be too frequent.

Antirez is trying to solve the problem of persistence while still keeping fast in-memory access. The author does not feel like Antirez will succeed here, and became "angry", which I find is a bit unreasonable.

I personally use Redis in production for what it's currently good for. If the persistence with speed issue is solved, all the better. It's not an all or nothing type of situation. The worst thing the author could do in this situation is to pick SQLite as your one and only data store for the entire stack. There's nothing wrong with having multiple types of datastores. In fact it is the norm and trying to fight against it at this time is kind of pointless.