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by donatj 971 days ago
> It is part of the drive to make Redis "more like your classic database," he said. In the future, support for natural language queries and enhanced vector and feature store capabilities will be added. This initiative aligns with Redis's ambition to be seen as more than just a fast, albeit expensive, cache

This sounds to me like not understanding your place in the market or why people use your product. I can name half a dozen classic SQL databases off hand. I can’t name a tool that competes with Redis at their niche. Why aim for an already oversaturated market when you already have a good profitable niche.

2 comments

> Why aim for an already oversaturated market when you already have a good profitable niche.

Presumably because there are a lot of things that straddles the two, and where you risk losing people to databases or hybrid setups where the Redis use will be simple enough that people won't want to pay for support.

E.g. cases where you can't afford to keep it all in memory where you today might end up resorting to using Redis as just a dumb-ish in front of a database, or even avoiding Redis entirely in favour of in-memory tables or aggressive cache settings for your database even in cases where you might prefer Redis if it could intelligently handle a larger working set more cheaply.

And also to create a buffer given that the level of oversaturation in the classic database market may make their niche a tempting target to try to expand into for some of those to set themselves apart.

Assumedly, because they do know their place in the market and decided it's not great and that the outlook is worse.

Recently DHH of Rails fame gave a talk about Redis and how at their company it's being replaced in favor of long term storage on the now much faster and cheaper SSDs.

The takeaway was that the long caching it enables yields far better real world results in their products. He even had some charts.

URL to talk?