Motivation

I build zeeSQL to remove operational and software complexity from most small to medium applications.

Remove complexity from small and medium application

Even simple apps are becoming increasingly complex.

Applications today usually have at least 3 moving parts.

1. Some persistent layer like a database

2. A fast ephemeral storage

3. Some sort of queue

Modern database solutions like Postres can usually manage almost everything, but they are never really quite enough.

You are not going to cache your data in Postgres, you are going to use Redis or Memcache. Similarly for session information.

Moreover, databases are hard and complex to operate. Complex, even before to create all the modern container orchestration infrastructure.

Redis is another very good candidate to be a single solution for the data need of small or medium applications, it works very well as fast ephemeral storage and as a queue system. Moreover, it has great persistence capabilities. However, besides simple use cases, it is hard to use as the only database.

Most applications need some form of complex data query and filtering.

zeeSQL is born to address this small niche.

It provides a fast, simple, and easy to operate SQL engine that is embedded in Redis. Adding more capabilities on top of the Redis features. It inherits all the persistency guarantees of Redis, and it is perfect to use as a persistency layer in small to medium applications.

Using zeeSQL it is possible to use a single, easy to maintain, and easy to operate external process for all the application data needs.

Then working in-memory by default, zeeSQL turns out to be very fast. And I try my very best to keep performance as high as possible.

Simplify Redis

The first version of zeeSQL kept completely separated the data belongings to zeeSQL and the data from Redis.

zeeSQL was not able to query and see data from Redis.

Then users start to ask how to query data that are stored in Redis.

People wanted to use the SQL capabilities of zeeSQL to query data in Redis. It makes sense, the technology, and the code were ready for this use case, and it improves the use cases of zeeSQL.

The latest version of zeeSQL can now integrate with Redis hashes allow people to search Redis data by value.

This is really another big simplification for developers and Redis users.

Without zeeSQL, if you needed to search value in Redis hash, you had two choices.

1. Get all the data from Redis to your code, and then implement search, filter, and aggregation by hand.

2. Maintains separated data structure in Redis to quickly identify the elements you are interested in.

Of course, neither choice is optimal.

Fetching all the data from Redis is a slow operation, that keeps the Redis process busy, increments the tail latency, and saturates the bandwidth. Also implementing search, filtering, and aggregation in code is a slow and error-prone process. It would be much better if Redis could return directly only the data we are interested in.

Keeping separated data structures is very cumbersome and error-prone. Whenever you update a Redis hash value, you need also to update all the other data structures, otherwise, you will keep a wrong view of your data. And these updates need to be done on insertion, deletions, and when you modify the data. Moreover, it is not flexible when new business requirements come along. It would be much better if Redis could keep track itself of the data and figure out by itself how to query them.

With zeeSQL all of this is now possible.

Values from Redis hashes are pushed into a standard SQL table, and from there they can be queried.

This is a superior model to search Redis by value. It keeps the best of the two alternatives overcoming both limitations.

It allows users to specify what data they want, and zeeSQL finds the best way to provide only those information. Without the need to maintains any separated data structures.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

The motivation for creating zeeSQL is to simplify developers' life.

First, it simplified operations at the data level, offering a single solution for small to medium applications to solve all their data needs.

Then zeeSQL simplifies Redis operations, solving how to search Redis by value and not only by key.

If you would like to learn more about zeeSQL, please visit the README or try to follow the tutorial. You can also check out the command references.

If you got more questions you can contact me at [e-mail]