Glossary

PEL

Pending Entries List is an internal list maintained by redis for each stream and consumer group combination. The list is used to surface stream entries to consumers groups interested in revisiting entries that were not acknowledged.

Pipelining

A technique for improving performance by issuing multiple commands at once without waiting for the response for each individual command. For more details see the Redis manual entry on pipelining.

Pub/Sub

Publish/Subscribe messaging paradigm where message senders (publishers) send messages to a channel without knowledge of the recipients of the message. Receipients subscribe to channels and asynchronously consume messages that they are interested in. For more details refer to the Redis manual entry on Pub/Sub

Redis

Redis is an open source, in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, message broker, and streaming engine. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.

Redis Cluster

Redis scales horizontally with a deployment topology called Redis Cluster. To learn more please read Redis Cluster 101

Redis Modules

Redis modules make it possible to extend Redis functionality using external modules that implement new Redis commands with features similar to what can be done inside the core itself.

RESP

Redis clients use Redis serialization protocol (RESP) specification to communicate with the Redis server. For more detials see RESP protocol spec

RESP3

RESP3 extends RESP to include support for primitives such as double & boolean and for container structures such as maps & sets. For more details see the RESP3 Specification

Sharded Pub/Sub

Support for Sharded Pub/Sub is available as of Redis version: 7.0.0 and refers to routing messages to cluster nodes by applying the same alogrithm used to distribute keys to distribute channels. For more details see the Redis manual entry on Sharded Pub/Sub

Server assisted client side caching

Client side caching is a technique to increase performance by eliminating unnecessary round trips to database servers by caching responses from the server within the application’s memory. This invariably requires some kind of invalidation technique to remove stale entries from the application’s memory. Server assisted client side caching uses subscriptions to the notifications from the redis server whenever a key is mutated to invalidate local cached entries. For more details see the Redis manual entry on client side caching

Streams

Streams are essentially an abstract append-only in-memory log datastructure which can be used for various use cases such as timeseries, as queue for a Pub/Sub application architecture. For more details see the Redis manual entry on streams

Transactions

Redis Transactions allow the execution of multiple commands as a single isolated operation. For more details refer to the Redis manual entry on transactions.