Redis data types cheatsheet

Redis is not just as simple as a Key-Value storage engine, but rather a structured data engine would be more accurate. It supports 5 different data structures that we are going to explore in this post. We will also discover some commonly used commands used in Redis for each data types.

Data structures used in Redis

Structure type	What it contains	Structure read/write ability
STRING	Strings, integers, or floating-point values	Operate on the whole string, parts, increment/ decrement the integers and floats
LIST	Linked list of strings	Push or pop items from both ends, trim based on offsets, read individual or multiple items, find or remove items by value
SET	Unordered collection of unique strings	Add, fetch, or remove individual items, check membership, intersect, union, difference, fetch random items
HASH	Unordered hash table of keys to values	Add, fetch, or remove individual items, fetch the whole hash
ZSET (sorted set)	Ordered mapping of string members to floating-point scores, ordered by score	Add, fetch, or remove individual values, fetch items based on score ranges or member value

1. STRING

Out of the five data structures, STRING is the most basic and simple data type. STRINGs in Redis are similar to strings that we see in other languages or other key-value stores. It can contain any kind of data. You have a key pointing to a value, where both key and value are text or binary strings.

GET: Fetches the data stored at the given key
SET: Sets the value stored at the given key
DEL: Deletes the value stored at the given key

2. LIST

LIST lets you store an ordered sequence of strings.

Commands to use with LIST:

LPUSH: Push items to the front.
RPUSH: Push items to the back.
LPOP: Pop items from the front.
RPOP: Pop items from the back.
LINDEX: Fetch an item at a given position.
LRANGE: Fetch a range of items.

3. HASH

HASH allows you to store a mapping of keys to values. It’s like a collection of keys and corresponding values.

Commands to use with HASH:

HSET: Stores the value at the key in the hash
HGET: Fetches the value at the given hash key
HGETALL: Fetches the entire hash
HDEL: Removes a key from the hash, if it exists

4. SET

SET is similar to List, but it keeps all strings unique and unordered.

Commands to use with SET:

SADD: Add items by value
SREM: Remove items by value
SMEMBERS: Returns the entire set of items
SISMEMBER: Checks if an item is in the set

5. ZSET

ZSET is somewhat similar to HASH which holds a type of key and value. The keys (members) are unique, and the values (scores) are floating-point numbers.

Commands to use with ZSET:

ZADD: Add new member and score
ZRANGE: Fetch all members and scores in sorted order
ZRANGEBYSCORE: Fetch members and scores based on a range of scores
ZREM: Remove member and score from ZSET.

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