Redis Reference

This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official Redis documentation before being relied on in production.

This section’s bibliography lists the reference material consulted while preparing these pages.

Welcome to the Redis reference. Redis is an in-memory data structure server: it keeps its primary copy of the keyspace in RAM for sub-millisecond latency, persists it to disk through RDB snapshots and/or an AOF write log, and layers a growing set of multi-model capabilities — JSON documents, a full-text and vector Query Engine, streams, probabilistic and time-series structures — on top of the classic string/list/set/hash/ sorted-set primitives. Examples throughout this section target Redis Open Source 8.10 (specifically 8.10.2) as the baseline, with client examples against Jedis 8 and Lettuce 7.7; the Spring Boot pages layer in Spring Boot 4.1, Spring Data Redis 4.1, Spring AI 2.0, Redis OM Spring 1.0, Spring Session 4.1 and Testcontainers 2.0, and Redis Insight 3.8 is used for interactive browsing throughout. All of these were re-checked as current, stable lines at the time of writing: Redis Open Source’s own release notes confirm 8.10.2 as its latest patch, and the Spring ecosystem’s June 2026 train shipped Spring Boot 4.1 alongside matching 4.1.x releases of Spring Data Redis, Spring Session and (per its own changelog) Testcontainers 2.0.5, with Spring AI reaching its 2.0 general availability the same week — the one point worth flagging is Redis OM Spring, which has since moved on to an actively maintained 2.0.x line upstream; this section keeps its examples on the 1.0.x baseline the rest of these pages were written and verified against, so annotation names and package layout stay consistent from page to page, and readers adopting Redis OM Spring fresh should check its current reference documentation for any 2.0.x API differences.

Redis release timeline

Redis’s licence has moved twice in the versions this section covers: the 7.4 line left the permissive BSD-3-Clause license behind for the source-available RSALv2/SSPLv1 pair, and the 8.0 line added the OSI-approved AGPLv3 as a third licensing option — marketed as "Redis Open Source" — with the Linux Foundation taking on governance of the project alongside Redis Ltd. The Linux Foundation separately forked the last BSD-licensed release (7.2.4) as Valkey, covered on this section’s Redis Software, Cloud, Kubernetes & Valkey page.

Release Date Headline features Licence / packaging

Release	Date	Headline features	Licence / packaging
7.2	Aug 2023	Sharded pub/sub, `OBJECT FREQ` improvements, and the last release before Redis Stack modules (JSON, Search, TimeSeries, Bloom) began merging into core.	BSD-3-Clause — the last fully permissive release; later forked by the Linux Foundation as Valkey 7.2.4.
7.4	Mar 2024	Hash field TTLs (`HEXPIRE`/`HPERSIST` and friends), client-side caching improvements.	Relicensed away from BSD to a dual RSALv2/SSPLv1 source-available license — no longer OSI-approved open source; this is the release that triggered the Valkey fork.
8.0	May 2025	Redis Stack’s JSON, Query Engine (Search), Time Series and probabilistic (Bloom/Cuckoo/HyperLogLog/Top-K) capabilities merged into Redis proper for the first time, plus a claimed I/O-threading performance jump.	Added AGPLv3 as a third licensing option ("Redis Open Source"), restoring OSI-approved open-source status under joint Redis Ltd./Linux Foundation stewardship.
8.2	2025	Database-scoped management roles and data-path command auditing groundwork on the Enterprise/Software side, plus continued Query Engine and vector-search refinement on the Open Source side.	AGPLv3/RSALv2/SSPLv1 tri-license continues.
8.4	Jul 2026	New `DELEX`/`DIGEST` commands, atomic compare-and-set/compare-and-delete `SET` extensions, `MSETEX`, and an `XREADGROUP … CLAIM` min-idle-time enhancement for consuming idle pending and new stream entries together.	Tri-license continues.
8.6	2026	Disk-based search indexing (preview), an Active-Active database upgrade API, and a JSON string-reuse mechanism for Active-Active deployments.	Tri-license continues.
8.8	2026	Incremental Query Engine, vector-search and operational hardening on the 8.x line ahead of 8.10.	Tri-license continues.
8.10	Sep 2026	The current baseline for this section (patch 8.10.2); primarily a security and stability release — see Getting Started for the full round trip against it.	Tri-license continues.

7.2

Aug 2023

Sharded pub/sub, OBJECT FREQ improvements, and the last release before Redis Stack modules (JSON, Search, TimeSeries, Bloom) began merging into core.

BSD-3-Clause — the last fully permissive release; later forked by the Linux Foundation as Valkey 7.2.4.

7.4

Mar 2024

Hash field TTLs (HEXPIRE/HPERSIST and friends), client-side caching improvements.

Relicensed away from BSD to a dual RSALv2/SSPLv1 source-available license — no longer OSI-approved open source; this is the release that triggered the Valkey fork.

8.0

May 2025

Redis Stack’s JSON, Query Engine (Search), Time Series and probabilistic (Bloom/Cuckoo/HyperLogLog/Top-K) capabilities merged into Redis proper for the first time, plus a claimed I/O-threading performance jump.

Added AGPLv3 as a third licensing option ("Redis Open Source"), restoring OSI-approved open-source status under joint Redis Ltd./Linux Foundation stewardship.

8.2

2025

Database-scoped management roles and data-path command auditing groundwork on the Enterprise/Software side, plus continued Query Engine and vector-search refinement on the Open Source side.

AGPLv3/RSALv2/SSPLv1 tri-license continues.

8.4

Jul 2026

New DELEX/DIGEST commands, atomic compare-and-set/compare-and-delete SET extensions, MSETEX, and an XREADGROUP … CLAIM min-idle-time enhancement for consuming idle pending and new stream entries together.

Tri-license continues.

8.6

2026

Disk-based search indexing (preview), an Active-Active database upgrade API, and a JSON string-reuse mechanism for Active-Active deployments.

Tri-license continues.

8.8

2026

Incremental Query Engine, vector-search and operational hardening on the 8.x line ahead of 8.10.

Tri-license continues.

8.10

Sep 2026

The current baseline for this section (patch 8.10.2); primarily a security and stability release — see Getting Started for the full round trip against it.

Tri-license continues.

timeline title Redis release & licence timeline 2023-08 : 7.2 (BSD-3-Clause) 2024-03 : 7.4 (RSALv2 / SSPLv1) 2025-05 : 8.0 (+ AGPLv3, Redis Open Source, Linux Foundation) 2025 : 8.2 2026-07 : 8.4 2026 : 8.6 2026 : 8.8 2026-09 : 8.10 (8.10.2, current baseline)

How to read this section

Start with Getting Started and Architecture, Keyspace & Eviction to get Redis running and understand how it actually executes commands, then move through the core data types (strings/bitmaps/bitfields, lists/sets/sorted sets/geospatial and hashes). From there, the multi-model pages build outward: streams (Streams, Pub/Sub & Keyspace Notifications), JSON and the Query Engine (JSON, Query Engine: Indexing & Data Modeling and Query Engine: Search & Aggregations), then vector search built on top of the Query Engine, and probabilistic & time-series structures. Next, pipelining, transactions & scripting covers programmability, followed by the operations cluster — persistence, replication/Sentinel/cluster, security and administration/monitoring/troubleshooting — then clients and applied material (Clients & Client-Side Caching, Use Cases & Patterns and Redis Software, Redis Cloud, Kubernetes & Valkey), the three Spring Boot pages, and finally the three cloud-deployment pages (Deploying Redis on AWS, Deploying Redis on Azure and Deploying Redis on Google Cloud).

This section also connects outward to other parts of the site. On the Spring Boot side, see Spring Boot Caching and Near-Far Caches for the caching abstractions the Spring Boot: Redis as a Cache page builds on, and Scheduling & ShedLock for using Redis as a distributed lock backend for scheduled jobs; Messaging covers Redis Pub/Sub and Streams alongside other Spring Boot messaging choices, and Quarkus: NoSQL & Other Stores covers the equivalent Quarkus client integration. For the vector-search material specifically, see the sibling Qdrant Reference for a purpose-built vector database to compare against, and Neo4j Reference and Elasticsearch Reference for graph- and search-engine-native alternatives; Prometheus Reference is the natural companion for scraping the metrics this section’s administration/monitoring page exposes.

What’s covered

Foundations

Getting Started — what Redis is (and is not), editions and licensing, installation, redis-cli, and a first end-to-end round trip.
Architecture, Keyspace & Eviction — the single-threaded execution model, I/O threading, keyspace layout, and expiration/eviction policies.

Core data types

Strings, Bitmaps & Bitfields — the string type and its counter, bitmap and bitfield operations.
Hashes — field/value maps, field-level TTLs, and HGETEX/HSETEX/ HGETDEL.
Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Arrays & Geospatial — ordered and unordered collection types, ranking with sorted sets, the index-addressed Array type, and geospatial indexing.
JSON — the native JSON data type, JSONPath access, and atomic in-place updates.

Multi-model capabilities

Query Engine: Indexing & Data Modeling — FT.CREATE schemas, field types, and modeling hashes/JSON documents for search.
Query Engine: Search & Aggregations — query syntax, full-text search, filtering, and the aggregation pipeline.
Vector Search — VECTOR fields, HNSW/flat indexing, KNN/ VECTOR_RANGE queries, and the standalone VADD/VSIM vector-set commands.
Streams & Pub/Sub — the append-only stream type, consumer groups, and fire-and-forget Pub/Sub messaging.
Probabilistic & Time-Series Structures — HyperLogLog, Bloom/Cuckoo filters, Top-K, and the Time Series data type.

Programmability

Pipelining, Transactions & Scripting — pipelining for round-trip reduction, MULTI/EXEC transactions, Lua scripting, and Redis Functions.

Operations

Persistence & Primary Database — RDB snapshots, the AOF write log, and hybrid persistence trade-offs.
Replication, Sentinel & Cluster — primary/replica replication, Sentinel-based failover, and hash-slot clustering.
Security — authentication, ACLs, TLS, and network-level hardening.
Administration, Monitoring & Troubleshooting — INFO/CONFIG, slow-log and latency tooling, metrics, and common failure diagnosis.

Clients, use cases & editions

Clients & Client-Side Caching — the Jedis and Lettuce client libraries and CLIENT TRACKING-based client-side caching (RESP3).
Use Cases & Patterns — caching, session storage, rate limiting, leaderboards, and job-queue patterns built from the primitives above.
Redis Software, Cloud, Kubernetes & Valkey — the commercial Enterprise/Software and Cloud editions, the Kubernetes Operator, and Valkey compared to Redis Open Source.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot: Redis as a Cache — Spring’s cache abstraction backed by Redis, RedisCacheManager configuration, and TTL/serialization tuning.
Spring Boot: Spring Data Redis & Custom Queries — RedisTemplate, @RedisHash repositories, Redis OM Spring’s @Document/EntityStream, and Spring Session Data Redis.
Spring Boot: Redis as a Vector Database — the Spring AI RedisVectorStore starter and API, compared against hand-written Jedis and Redis OM Spring vector search.

Cloud deployment

Deploying on AWS — Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and MemoryDB.
Deploying on Google Cloud — Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis and Memorystore for Redis Cluster.
Deploying on Azure — Azure Managed Redis and its predecessor Azure Cache for Redis.

Bibliography

Official Redis documentation:

The Redis documentation — the primary source every page in this section is written and verified against; see in particular the Develop section (data types, clients, tools), the Operate section (persistence, replication, cluster, security, administration), the Integrate section (Spring, LangChain and other framework integrations), and the Redis commands reference.
Redis Open Source 8.10 release notes and the sibling release-notes pages for the 7.2 through 8.8 lines linked from them — the source for this page’s release timeline.
Redis licenses — the RSALv2/SSPLv1/AGPLv3 tri-license explained.
The redis/redis repository — the Redis Open Source server source.
The redis-developer/riot repository — Redis Input/Output Tools, a bulk import/export and live-replication CLI referenced from this section’s operations pages.
The official redis Docker Hub image — the container image used throughout this section’s getting-started and deployment examples.

Spring documentation:

Spring Data Redis reference documentation.
Spring AI reference documentation, in particular the Redis vector store integration.
Spring Session reference documentation, in particular its Redis integration used by Spring Boot: Spring Data Redis & Custom Queries.

Cloud-provider documentation:

AWS ElastiCache documentation — referenced from Deploying Redis on AWS.
Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis documentation — referenced from Deploying Redis on Google Cloud.
Azure Managed Redis documentation — referenced from Deploying Redis on Azure.
Fugaro, Luigi & Ortensi, Mirko. Redis Stack for Application Modernization: Build real-time multi-model applications at any scale with Redis. Packt Publishing, 2023. ISBN 978-1-83763-818-5. Consulted as part of the bibliography for this section — see the publisher’s book page and the accompanying code bundle.

The book above is a consulted bibliographic reference only. It is not the primary or main reference for this section, so where it and redis.io, docs.spring.io, or a cloud provider’s own documentation disagree, the official documentation is authoritative and the difference is noted.