Redis hashes

Introduction to Redis hashes

Redis hashes are record types structured as collections of field-value pairs. You can use hashes to represent basic objects and to store groupings of counters, among other things.

While hashes are handy to represent objects, actually the number of fields you can put inside a hash has no practical limits (other than available memory), so you can use hashes in many different ways inside your application.

The command HSET sets multiple fields of the hash, while HGET retrieves a single field. HMGET is similar to HGET but returns an array of values:

There are commands that are able to perform operations on individual fields as well, like HINCRBY:

You can find the full list of hash commands in the documentation.

It is worth noting that small hashes (i.e., a few elements with small values) are encoded in special way in memory that make them very memory efficient.

Basic commands

  • HSET sets the value of one or more fields on a hash.
  • HGET returns the value at a given field.
  • HMGET returns the values at one or more given fields.
  • HINCRBY increments the value at a given field by the integer provided.

See the complete list of hash commands.

Examples

  • Store counters for the number of times bike:1 has been ridden, has crashed, or has changed owners:

Performance

Most Redis hash commands are O(1).

A few commands - such as HKEYS, HVALS, and HGETALL - are O(n), where n is the number of field-value pairs.

Limits

Every hash can store up to 4,294,967,295 (2^32 - 1) field-value pairs. In practice, your hashes are limited only by the overall memory on the VMs hosting your Redis deployment.

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