[hubertzhang]

I’m Hubert, CTO of EloqData. That’s a great question.

Redis Cluster is often thought of as a distributed database, but in reality it’s not truly distributed. It relies on a smart client to route queries to the correct shard—similar to how mongos works in MongoDB. This design means Redis Cluster cannot perform distributed transactions, and developers often need to use hashtags to manually place related data on the same shard.

EloqKV takes a different approach. It’s a natively distributed database with direct interconnects between nodes. You can connect to any node with a standard Redis client, and still read or write data that physically resides on other nodes. This architecture enables true distributed transactions across shards, fully supporting MULTI/EXEC and Lua scripts without special client logic or manual sharding workarounds.

[hodr_super]

Distributed Lua is cool. Is your implementation similar to DragonflyDB, which doesn’t allow handling undeclared keys in Lua? For example, if I want to generate a new key dynamically inside a script like: `local queue_key = "queue:user:" .. uid` How does your system handle such cases?

[hubertzhang]

Yes, Lua in EloqKV has no such limitations. You can freely read data, generate new keys, and even query those keys within Lua scripts. Underneath, EloqKV’s transaction layer is powered by our data substrate, which provides full ACID guarantees. FYI https://www.eloqdata.com/blog/2025/07/14/technology

Could you share a bit more about your specific use case? That will help me explain how EloqKV can best support it.

[hodr_super]

I built a SaaS app with per-tenant caches. Initially I used Redis but ran into scale-up issues, so I tried DragonflyDB. It works well in general, but my Lua script use case isn’t supported by default.

The use case is straightforward: each tenant has cached objects like: `cache:{tenant_id}:{object_id} → cached JSON/doc`

I also maintain a tag index to find all object IDs with a given tag: `tag:{tenant_id}:{tag} → set of object_ids (tag example: “pricing”, “profile”)`

When a tag changes (say “pricing”), I use a single Lua script to look up all object IDs in the tag set and then delete their cache entries in one atomic operation.

[hubertzhang]

That use case aligns perfectly with EloqKV’s capabilities. In pure cache mode, batching multi-key deletions within Lua scripts can significantly reduce latency by minimizing client–server round trips.