Sunil Arora

Redis Lua Scripting - Violet Hill

18 Jun 2011

Redis is one of my favorite data storage platform and I won’t miss a single chance to use it wherever I can. One of the biggest strengths of Redis has been that you can define your data modelling in the most natural form like key-value/hashes/lists/sets. I prefer thinking of data storage in form of list, hashes, sets instead of tables :).

Redis provides a very good set of APIs(commands) which pretty much allows majority of the operations you would like to perform on these data types in a single command. 

But in the past, I encountered situations where solution design required the following:

Situations like above pretty much made me turn away from Redis in the past. 

This is going to change now. About a month ago, @antirez (creator of Redis) released Lua-Scripting support in a different branch by hacking over a weekend (that shows how terrific hacker he is).

Lua-Scripting support Redis pretty much solves majority of the problems of the nature described above. This has great potential and can’t wait to see what community do with it.

I spend sometime today to try out scripting, so thought of doing a quick write up about what I did today.

I started with simple goal of implementing two new commands zpop and zrevpop for sorted set data type using scripting.

  1. ZPOP: This will allow popping out element with lowest score from a sorted set.
  2. ZREVPOP: This will allow popping out element with highest score from a sorted set.

Setup

Follow these steps to get scripting version of Redis running on your machine.

git clone https://github.com/antirez/redis.git
cd redis
git checkout scripting
make

Now you should all the binaries ready in the src folder (redis-server and redis-cli). Run the server by running redis-server binary.

ZPOP Implementation

Redis implements redis.call interface to invoke redis commands from Lua code. Here is Lua script for zpop command.

val = redis.call('zrange', KEYS[1], 0, 0)
if val then redis.call('zremrangebyrank', KEYS[1], 0, 0) end
return val

Testing

Redis server implements new command “eval” to invoke lua scripts. Quick syntax goes like this:

EVAL <body> <num_keys_in_args> [<arg1> <arg2> ... <arg_N>]

You can test your lua script using redis-cli program. 

Lets populate sorted set named zset by inserting a, b, c with scores values 1, 2 and 3 respectively.

./redis-cli zadd zset 1 a
./redis-cli zadd zset 2 b
./redis-cli zadd zset 3 c

Here is command to test zpop.lua file. You should see 

./redis-cli -p 10000 eval "$(cat path-to-zpop.lua-file)" 1 zset
1) "a"
./redis-cli -p 10000 eval "$(cat path-to-zpop.lua-file)" 1 zset
1) "b"

On the similar lines, zrevpop can be implemented using following lua script.

val = redis.call('zrange', KEYS[1], -1, -1)
if val then redis.call('zremrangebyrank', KEYS[1], -1, -1) end
return val

I am going to do a follow up post with some complex examples to demostrate the true potential of Lua scripting.

Thanks @antirez for keeping this project on the edge by innovating at all the levels of the project. 

comments powered by Disqus

Related Posts