When to use RDI

RDI is a good fit when:

• You want your app/micro-services to read from Redis to scale reads at speed.
• You want to transfer data to Redis from a single source database.
• You must use a slow database as the system of record for the app.
• The app must always write its data to the slow database.
• Your app can tolerate eventual consistency of data in the Redis cache.
• You want a self-managed solution or AWS based solution.
• The source data changes frequently in small increments.
• There are no more than 10K changes per second in the source database.
• RDI throughput during full sync would not exceed 30K records per second (for an average 1KB record size) and during CDC would not exceed 10K records per second (for an average 1KB record size).
• The total data size is not larger than 100GB (since this would typically exceed the throughput limits just mentioned for full sync).
• You don’t need to perform join operations on the data from several tables into a nested Redis JSON object.
• RDI supports the data transformations you need for your app.
• Your data caching needs are too complex or demanding to implement and maintain yourself.
• Your database administrator has reviewed RDI's requirements for the source database and confirmed that they are acceptable.

When not to use RDI

RDI is not a good fit when:

• You are migrating an existing data set into Redis only once.
• Your app needs immediate cache consistency (or a hard limit on latency) rather than eventual consistency.
• You need transactional consistency between the source and target databases.
• The data is ingested from two replicas of Active-Active at the same time.
• The app must write data to the Redis cache, which then updates the source database (write-behind/write-through patterns).
• Your data set will only ever be small.
• Your data is updated by some batch or ETL process with long and large transactions - RDI will fail processing these changes.
• You need complex stream processing of data (aggregations, sliding window processing, complex custom logic).
• You need to write data to multiple targets from the same pipeline (Redis supports other ways to replicate data across Redis databases such as replicaOf and Active Active).
• Your database administrator has rejected RDI's requirements for the source database.