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Comment by fpereiro | Hacker News Reader

Good point. I'm drawn to redis not so much for its performance (which can be comparable to that of a relational database) - but rather for the expressive power of storing data in general purpose data structures (hashes, lists, sets) rather than in relational databases. That expressive power is what I miss when not working with redis.

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Can't you do all this with Postgres? I like Redis but as pg brings up its support for schemaless blobs or quisi-schemaless json blobs I find it harder and harder to find a solid use case for Redis.

Redis still has an edge on use cases with auto-expiration.

I've never really tried, but it looks like lists and hashes could be implemented in Postgres through json blobs. That would still leave out sets and zsets, which I also find essential in most work I do with Redis.

Besides having all the data structures, I love just connecting to Redis without specifying a database name (there's just a database number, which defaults to 0), a database user, or needing to create a table or a schema. Redis is, so to speak, just there. Not saying this is better than Postgres objectively - I just like it more.

Some of your patterns on the example application are super interesting - now I'm wishing for a redis-like, disk-first managed database and there isn't one. Its mostly document-stores out there.

Glad you find them interesting!

As for a redis-like disk-first database, it would be amazing, but I don't know if it is really possible (unless performance was severely sacrificed). This could be an interesting area to explore.

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