FAQ

Find answers to common questions about RDI

Which license does RDI use?

You must purchase a commercial license for RDI with Redis Enterprise. This includes two extra Redis Enterprise shards (primary and replica) for the staging database.

Does RDI have any external dependencies?

RDI is packaged with all of its dependencies except for two dependencies that you need if you use IBM Db2 as a source:

• Db2 JDBC driver
• IBM Infopshere Data Replication license

How does RDI track data changes in the source database?

RDI uses mechanisms that are specific for each of the supported source databases:

• Oracle: RDI uses logminer to parse the Oracle binary log and archive logs. This lists any changes in a database view that RDI can query.
• MySQL/MariaDB: RDI uses binary log replication to get all the commits.
• PostgreSQL: RDI uses the pgoutput plugin.
• SQL Server: RDI uses the CDC mechanism.

How much data can RDI process?

RDI uses the concept of processing units. Each processing unit uses 1 CPU core and can process about 10,000 records per second, assuming the records have a size of about 1KB each. This throughput might change slightly depending on the number of columns, the number of data transformations, and the speed of the network. Typically, one processing unit is enough for RDI to deal with the traffic from a relational database.

Can RDI work with any Redis database?

No. RDI is designed and tested to work only with Redis Enterprise. The staging database can only use version 6.4 or above. The target Redis database can be of any version and can be a replica of an Active-Active replication setup or an Auto tiering database.

Can RDI automatically track changes to the source database schema?

If you don't configure RDI to capture a specific set of tables in the schema then it will detect any new tables when they are added. Similarly, RDI will capture new table columns and changes to column names unless you configure it for a specific set of columns. Bear in mind that the Redis keys in the target database will change to reflect the new or renamed tables and columns.

Should I be concerned when the log says RDI is out of memory?

Sometimes the Debezium log will contain a message saying that RDI is out of memory. This is not an error but an informative message to say that RDI is applying backpressure to Debezium. See Backpressure mechanism in the Architecture guide for more information.

What happens when RDI can't write to the target Redis database?

RDI will keep attempting to write the changes to the target and will also attempt to reconnect to it, if necessary. While the target is disconnected, RDI will keep capturing change events from the source database and adding them to its streams in the staging database. This continues until the staging database gets low on space to store new events. When RDI detects this, it applies a "back pressure" mechanism to capture data from the source less frequently, which reduces the risk of running out of space altogether. The systems that the source databases use to record changes can retain the change data for at least a few hours, and RDI can catch up with the changes as soon as the target connection recovers or the staging database has more space available.

What does RDI do if the data is corrupted or invalid?

The collector reports the data to RDI in a structured JSON format. If the structure of the JSON data is invalid or if there is a fatal bug in the transformation job then RDI can't transform the data. When this happens, RDI will store the original data in a "dead letter queue" along with a message to say why it was rejected. The dead letter queue is stored as a capped stream in the RDI staging database. You can see its contents with Redis Insight or with the redis-di get-rejected command from the CLI.