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Here’s to the first release from MS Open Tech: Redis on Windows

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The past few weeks have been very busy in our offices as we announced the creation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Now that the dust has settled it’s time for us to resume our regular cadence in releasing code, and we are happy to share with you the very first deliverable from our new company: a new and significant iteration of our work on Redis on Windows, the open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store.

The major improvements in this latest version involve the process of saving data on disk. Redis on Linux uses an OS feature called Fork/Copy On Write. This feature is not available on Windows, so we had to find a way to be able to mimic the same behavior without changing completely the save on disk process so as to avoid any future integration issues with the Redis code.

The version we released today implements the Copy On Write process at the application level: instead of relying on the OS we added code to Redis so that some data structures are duplicated in such a way that Redis can still serve requests from clients while saving data on disk (thus achieving the same effect of Fork/Copy On Write does automatically on Linux).

You can find the code for this new version on the new MS Open Tech repository in GitHub, which is currently the place to work on the Windows version of Redis as per guidance from Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original author of the project. We will also continue working with the community to create a solid Windows port.

We consider this not to be production ready code, but a solid code base to be shared with the community to solicit feedback: as such, while we pursue stabilization, we are keeping the older version as default/stable on the GitHub repository. To try out the new code, please go to the bksavecow branch.

In the next few weeks we plan to extensively test the code so that developers can use it for more serious testing. In the meantime, we will keep looking at the ‘save on disk’ process to find out if there are other opportunities to make the code perform even better. We will promote the bksavecow branch to master as soon as we (and you!) are confident the code is stable.

Please send your feedback, file suggestions and issues to our GitHub repository. We look forward to further iterations and to working with the Redis community at large to make the Windows experience even better.

Claudio Caldato

Principal Program Manager

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    Will the new ReFS filesystem in Windows 8 have a copy-on-write feature?

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    One question: why?

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    Since the Windows kernel has support for fork() with copy-on-write, you could also have taken the opportunity to expose it in Win32.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    I would encourage you to implement Redis as an Azure service, that would really rock!

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    @ A .NET developer I don't know the answer to your question but here the problem is about copy-on-write of memory pages.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    Even if Windows Kernel could support a fork-like functionality, making it available through public APIs is not a trivial task.  

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    @noocyte Already in our roadmap :), we need first to get the code through extensive testing to make sure we have a stable code base then we can start looking into what it takes to get Redis to run as a service on Azure.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    @Claudio There are 'many' examples of ways to do the fork/copy on write in memory using public NT APIs.   Even back in 2000, there was a book by Gary (?) on Native NT APIs that engaged this conversation, and it has been beat to death with a ton of examples around the web in the past 12 years. If 'Windows' was NOT capable of doing this, the SUA would NOT have worked. Right? Maybe state that the Win32 APIs doesn't offer an equivalent, instead of saying Windows. Especially since people get confused about this stuff easily and it is misleading to limit the concept of Windows NT to just the Win32 subsystem. PS You do not need to publish these comments, just offering a couple of tips, and I do not want to portray your work as reductive or appear to be condescending, as it is not my intent. IP hopping on purpose

  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2012
    @Want to use redis on Windows   It is an interesting idea, please add an issue to our GitHub project so we can consider this feature for future releases (github.com/.../redis)

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2012
    Can we use the VS 2008 or Pro instead of 2010 t Express and still attain a working version of this ?

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2012
    @Shriram we provide a VS solution for VS2010 and now we also release binaries. If you want to use VS2008 you may have to rebuild the solution but that should be a simple task.

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2012
    @claudio .. Well , its all about trust, so lets see :) ms has been rather inconsistent before, maybe its culture can change though. I for one would appreciate it. I am using a lot of smartos now, but win server has some advantages still.