2016-05-11

Intro to Redis part 3

An introduction to Redis, pt 3: An exploration of Sets.

Welcome back to my introduction to Redis! This is part 3 of my introduction to Redis, so feel free to read my Intro to Redis part 1 and Intro to Redis part 2 if you haven’t yet.


So far, we have scratched the surface with the fundamentals and hashes, today we’re going to play with Sets! To reiterate what I stated in my previous articles, Redis has a multitude of uses, and what I demo is by no means its limit, so I strongly encourage everyone to follow along and deviate from this post as you see fit!


Note: All Redis commands can be used in lowercase, but I'll stay consistent with the documentation and use uppercase for all the examples in this series.


Sets

Sets in Redis are modeled after Mathematical sets and present a highly useful data structure. You can create a set by adding a member(s) to a key using SADD, and check the contents of a set with SMEMBERS; remember, sets can only contain unique members, of which you can count with SCARD.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SADD set1 cat
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> SADD set1 dog
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> SADD set1 bird
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS set1
1) "dog"
2) "bird"
3) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379> SADD set1 cat
(integer) 0
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS set1
1) "dog"
2) "bird"
3) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379> SCARD set1
(integer) 3
127.0.0.1:6379>

It should be noted that the return value for a duplicate entry is 0, but the return value for SADD is the number of successful additions. Not to be confused with whether or not the operation was a success or failure. Below is an example for when a duplicate is not added but the result is true, that is because 2 operations were queued, one was successful (1) and the other failed (0), thus it returned 1. If both were successful, then 2 would have been returned.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SADD set1 cat fish
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS set1
1) "fish"
2) "dog"
3) "bird"
4) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379>

The real power of sets comes when you have more than one set. Lets assume that we want to check the animals at two different zoos. We can rename (lazy copy) our demo set (set1) to be zoo1 using SUNIONSTORE.


We’re lazy, so were going to union (add) our previous set with a null (empty) set, so the resulting operation will be a lazy copy, leaving us with two sets of identical contents.


Note: SUNION is also available if you don’t want to store the results.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SUNIONSTORE zoo1 set1
(integer) 4
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo1
1) "dog"
2) "fish"
3) "cat"
4) "bird"
127.0.0.1:6379>

Just to prove the sets are identical, we can do a SDIFF (NAND) and SINTER (AND) on each of our sets, resulting in the empty set and our actual set respectively.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SDIFF zoo1 set1
(empty list or set)
127.0.0.1:6379> SDIFF set1 zoo1
(empty list or set)
127.0.0.1:6379> SINTER zoo1 set1
1) "dog"
2) "fish"
3) "cat"
4) "bird"
127.0.0.1:6379>

To show the power of SDIFF, let’s assume another Zoo pops up in town, we can see the difference in animals, and store them using SDIFFSTORE. Likewise, we can see what animals are in both using SINTER.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SADD zoo2 cat dog hippo monkey snake
(integer) 5
127.0.0.1:6379> SDIFF zoo1 zoo2
1) "fish"
2) "bird"
127.0.0.1:6379> SDIFF zoo2 zoo1
1) "snake"
2) "monkey"
3) "hippo"
127.0.0.1:6379> SINTER zoo1 zoo2
1) "dog"
2) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379>

Note how the SDIFF is different for each key ordering. The SDIFF essentially shows what is unique to the first set when compared with each of the following sets.


Lets imagine that our second zoo is hemorrhaging money with its 5 animals, and they need to cut costs. We can remove set members with SREM if we know what we want to remove, or SPOP if we just want to remove a random member.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo2
1) "hippo"
2) "dog"
3) "snake"
4) "cat"
5) "monkey"1
127.0.0.1:6379> SREM zoo2 hippo
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> SPOP zoo2
"monkey"
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo2
1) "dog"
2) "snake"
3) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379>

Now let’s imagine zoo1 is feeling the burn with 4 animals, but zoo2 is making the big bucks, and looking to re-expand. We can pick a random animal from the set using SRANDMEMBER, then check for a set member with SISMEMBER, and move members between sets with SMOVE.

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo1
1) "dog"
2) "fish"
3) "cat"
4) "bird"
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo2
1) "dog"
2) "snake"
3) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379> SRANDMEMBER zoo1
"bird"
127.0.0.1:6379> SISMEMBER zoo2 bird
(integer) 0
127.0.0.1:6379> SMOVE zoo1 zoo2 bird
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo1
1) "dog"
2) "fish"
3) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS zoo2
1) "dog"
2) "snake"
3) "bird"
4) "cat"
127.0.0.1:6379>

Forgive the animal/zoo references, it happened to be a better story than reading pure Redis documentation, yeah?

Examples

If we want to look at the power of Redis sets with real world examples, let’s consider the following: We have an E-commerce website, and want to track the visitors each month.


Or, alternatively, If you wanted to give away 3 prizes to 5 people:


Or, you’re lazy and want to play Rock, Paper, Scissors..


Conclusion

As stated earlier, the aim of this post was to explore the Set data type and understand its use cases. Sets are great when dealing with unique items, and can make calculating the difference between multiple collections of data a breeze.


I hope someone found this post helpful, and as always feel free to reach out to me on Twitter and suggest new topics for me to cover!

− Zack


P.S. - If you were wondering why I randomly took a hiatus from posting, I was getting married!