Arch Linux Is the Latest Distro Replacing Redis with Valkey

In NoSQL database news, Arch Linux "is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork," reports Phoronix.

Valkey is backed by the Linux Foundation, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, which the article points out is due to Redis's decision last year to shift the upstream Redis license from a BSD 3-clause to RSALv2 and SSPLv1. Valkey is replacing Redis in the Arch Linux extra repository and after a two week period the Redis package will be moved out to AUR and receive no further updates. Users are encouraged to migrate to Valkey as soon as possible.

Re: What's a Redis and why should I care?

[modecx]

Yeah, the website for the program is not much more illuminating. Evidently it's a sort of database cache which resides in RAM?

Re: What's a Redis and why should I care?

[vbdasc]

According to Wikipedia: "Redis is the most popular NoSQL database".

Re:

[Tablizer]

What's a good use-case for it that say MariaDB or SQLite can't do well? NoSql was over-hyped. It has valid niches, but they are niches.

Re:

[ffkom]

If you have no need for relations, then Redis offers significantly faster responses than SQL databases. Yes, the term "NoSQL" was over-hyped (and is a stupid name, anyway, since there are very different ways of organizing databases, not just "SQL" or "not SQL"), but given the abundance of web-services craving for fast response times for simple requests, it is not really a "niche" anymore. SQL databases were over-hyped, too, as there are sort of a "Jack of all trades, master of none". You can certainly do al

Re:

[evil_aaronm]

So if this is "no relations," can I just do a Perl "slurp" into memory, and then a pattern match on that? Or, just a grep on a file?

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Redis is a store for key-value pairs. So not only you can, but perhaps you should.

Re:

[ffkom]

So if this is "no relations," can I just do a Perl "slurp" into memory, and then a pattern match on that? Or, just a grep on a file?

Yes you can, but the first may consume excessive amounts of memory if you try to do it from every of many parallel running processes that cannot make proper use of shared memory (like many of the popular script languages do, which the cheapest of "web developers" like to use). And a "grep" on a file has a time complexity of O(n), so it will be inefficient for large amounts of keys, where the O(1) hash-table look ups that Redis does perform fine.

Re:

[Tablizer]

> and do not know in advance what kind of request you might require much later.

For business and admin apps, this is quite common.

Re:first four words of the summary

[phantomfive]

The killer use case for Redis is to do a lookup of user-id from cookie-UUID, since you have to do that on every request and it's a lot faster than MariaDB (and even if you have a catastrophic failure, no real harm is done, users just have to log in again). It's a way to quickly reduce the load on your main DBs, when you have millions of users.

Programmers have other uses for it, but they often fail to prepare for failure or timeouts, which do happen. Then mysterious bugs show up, and I end up having to fix the problem. You need to think of those things when you're programming.

Re:

[Raphael]

I have a slightly different view of this history. Instead of: "The history here is that this project was very popular on cloud providers (e.g. AWS calls their offering "Elasticache") and the original authors got pissy that they were being cut out of whatever money was being paid for using their free software. So they changed the license and here we are.", I would say: "... and the original investors got pissy that they were being cut out of whatever money was being paid for using the free software in which

Re:

[Latent Heat]

The term of art is "inside baseball."

Re: What's a Redis and why should I care?

[fluffernutter]

Redis is a key value database. On a fundamental level, it allows you to store different types of data under string keys or also timeout the data and capture all events relating to every key. It is very fast and can come together quickly for many powerful things. For example, one could easily create a system of keys that act as a database cache. Want cache data to age out? Just put a timeout on every key. Also redis provides methods to store the memory database state to disk without sacrificing memory speed so you can start from the same state after restart.

Re:

[ls671]

See also memcached which I believe uses its own internal format.
https://memcached.org/ [memcached.org]

Re:

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Made me laugh.

Re: What's a Redis and why should I care?

[jobslave]

Let's put it this way. If you're on /. and either don't know what Redis is or can't figure out how to look it up. You probably don't know what Arch Linux is let alone even use Linux and your knowledge of anything technology relate should be called into question.

Re:

[allo]

At least we know who runs Arch Linux.

Re: What's a Redis and why should I care?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The systemd guy, right?

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

One database replaced with another database that no one besides the distro maintainers would even notice.

Re:What's a Redis and why should I care?

[DrMrLordX]

It's less about the software and more about the licensing. Going from bsd 3-clause to a custom license package is quite a change.

Meanwhile,

[vbdasc]

Debian has both Valley and Redis.

Re: Meanwhile,

[vbdasc]

It's Valkey, fucking phone spellchecker.

Re:

[ls671]

Oh, I thought you had been thinking Valley Girls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Re:

[JThundley]

The version in Debian stable is the older 7.0 version. Redis changed the license in version 7.4. Genuinely asking and not trying to be snarky, what's your point?

QUICK TLDR SUMMARY

[gavron]

This is all TL;DR so if I'm short and you miss something feel free to blame me.

There are different types of databases. Popular in 2024 was Maria (SQL, FOSS fork of MySQL, competitor to Postgres aka PGsql, etc.).
Another type is key/value databases. SALARY=40000 RENT=15000 etc. Redis was FOSS but they* changed it. Valkey forked off Redis and they** are FOSS.

E

* The people who controled Redis started with an FOSS license,but changed it. I'm not a lawyer, so let's just go with that.
The FOSS community forked Redis to create Valkey, and its license is 100% FOSS, its govening body defined, and while donations are welcomed, it has at least a 12-year funding shelflife.

If I got anything wrong, it's on me. FOSS ALL THE WAY EVERYDAY DRILL DRILL DRILL INTO A WORM-BRAIN-HEAD BABY!

So many useless comments

[pooh666]

So I will add another. I know WTF Redis is and think very highly of it. But more like, WTF is Valkey and why should I care because I won't ever use it no matter what they do to the distributions. So because I do have the power of Google, unlike a few posters here, "Valkey as a community-led fork of Redis" so what? Another MariaDB which is what led me, happly, to move to Postgres. MySQL being purchased and thrown around like a bitch after that is what ruined it. Does Slashdot not even have techs anymore? I

Re: So many useless comments

[vbdasc]

What made you flee to Postgres? The emergence of MariaDB or that MySQL was purchased and thrown around like a bitch?

Re:

[jonbryce]

I migrated from Redis to Valkey (on FreeBSD) about 6 months ago.
As migrations go, it was extremely painless:
Install Valkey
Copy the contents of /usr/local/etc/redis.conf to /usr/local/etc/valkey.conf
Edit /etc/rc.conf to start the valkey service instead of the redis service
Shut down the redis service and start the valkey service (maybe about a minute of downtime here)
Uninstall redis

This is why I consider non-FOSS ...

[Qbertino]

... flat-out amateur and unprofessional. This is a perfect example of why, unlike other software, FOSS isn't a serious operational risk and potential epic waste of time, energy and resources.

Some storage provider builds a wicked fast and performant DB thing. It's FOSS and quickly becomes an industry standard. 10+ years in they start dicking around with the license and making people fidgety. A handful of people get fed up, fork the FOSS and everyone migrates. Not a single soul has to fear that their operatio