Data types

Strings —

Strings are the most basic kind of Redis value. Redis Strings are binary safe, this means that a Redis string can contain any kind of data, for instance a JPEG image or a serialized Ruby object.

A String value can be at max 512 Megabytes in length.

You can do a number of interesting things using strings in Redis, for instance you can:

Check all the available string commands for more information.

Lists —

Redis Lists are simply lists of strings, sorted by insertion order. It is possible to add elements to a Redis List pushing new elements on the head (on the left) or on the tail (on the right) of the list.

The LPUSH command inserts a new element on the head, while RPUSH inserts a new element on the tail. A new list is created when one of this operations is performed against an empty key. Similarly the key is removed from the key space if a list operation will empty the list. These are very handy semantics since all the list commands will behave exactly like they were called with an empty list if called with a non-existing key as argument.

Some example of list operations and resulting lists:

LPUSH mylist a   # now the list is "a"
LPUSH mylist b   # now the list is "b","a"
RPUSH mylist c   # now the list is "b","a","c" (RPUSH was used this time)

The max length of a list is 2^32 - 1 elements (4294967295, more than 4 billion of elements per list).

The main features of Redis Lists from the point of view of time complexity are the support for constant time insertion and deletion of elements near the head and tail, even with many millions of inserted items. Accessing elements is very fast near the extremes of the list but is slow if you try accessing the middle of a very big list, as it is an O(N) operation.

You can do many interesting things with Redis Lists, for instance you can:

Sets —

Redis Sets are an unordered collection of Strings. It is possible to add, remove, and test for existence of members in O(1) (constant time regardless of the number of elements contained inside the Set).

Redis Sets have the desirable property of not allowing repeated members. Adding the same element multiple times will result in a set having a single copy of this element. Practically speaking this means that adding a member does not require a check if exists then add operation.

A very interesting thing about Redis Sets is that they support a number of server side commands to compute sets starting from existing sets, so you can do unions, intersections, differences of sets in very short time.

The max number of members in a set is 2^32 - 1 (4294967295, more than 4 billion of members per set).

You can do many interesting things using Redis Sets, for instance you can:

Hashes —


HMSET user:1000 username antirez password P1pp0 age 34
HGETALL user:1000
HSET user:1000 password 12345
HGETALL user:1000

A hash with a few fields (where few means up to one hundred or so) is stored in a way that takes very little space, so you can store millions of objects in a small Redis instance.

While Hashes are used mainly to represent objects, they are capable of storing many elements, so you can use Hashes for many other tasks as well.

Every hash can store up to 2^32 - 1 field-value pairs (more than 4 billion).

Check the full list of Hash commands for more information.

Sorted sets —


With sorted sets you can add, remove, or update elements in a very fast way (in a time proportional to the logarithm of the number of elements). Since elements are taken in order and not ordered afterwards, you can also get ranges by score or by rank (position) in a very fast way. Accessing the middle of a sorted set is also very fast, so you can use Sorted Sets as a smart list of non repeating elements where you can quickly access everything you need: elements in order, fast existence test, fast access to elements in the middle!

In short with sorted sets you can do a lot of tasks with great performance that are really hard to model in other kind of databases.

With Sorted Sets you can: