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KeyDB VS RocksDB

Compare KeyDB VS RocksDB and see what are their differences

KeyDB logo KeyDB

KeyDB is fast NoSQL database with full compatibility for Redis APIs, clients, and modules.

RocksDB logo RocksDB

A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments
  • KeyDB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-06-19
  • RocksDB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-12

KeyDB features and specs

  • High Performance
    KeyDB offers superior performance over Redis by allowing multi-threading, which utilizes multiple CPU cores efficiently, leading to significant improvements in throughput and latency.
  • Redis Compatibility
    KeyDB is fully compatible with Redis, meaning users can easily switch between Redis and KeyDB without needing to change their existing code or data structures.
  • Active Replication
    It supports multi-primary (active-active) replication, enabling all replicas to accept writes without worrying about conflicts, which increases availability and resilience.
  • Built-in TLS
    KeyDB includes built-in TLS support which enhances security by allowing data encryption in transit, a feature that requires third-party solutions in some Redis setups.
  • Persistence Options
    KeyDB supports both RDB snapshotting and AOF logging, offering flexible persistence strategies to balance between performance and durability.

Possible disadvantages of KeyDB

  • Community Size
    KeyDB, while gaining popularity, has a smaller community compared to Redis, which can lead to less community support and fewer third-party tools or extensions.
  • Maturity
    As a relatively newer project compared to Redis, KeyDB may lack the same level of proven stability and maturity, making it a potentially riskier choice for critical applications.
  • Documentation and Resources
    While KeyDB has extensive documentation, it might not be as comprehensive or complete as Redis, potentially leading to longer project integration times.
  • Potential Compatibility Issues
    Although KeyDB is compatible with Redis, advanced Redis features or unusual configurations might face compatibility issues during migration.
  • Less Architectural Simplicity
    The added complexity of multi-threading and active-active replication modes can increase the operational overhead compared to Redis's simpler single-threaded, master-slave architecture.

RocksDB features and specs

  • High Performance
    RocksDB is designed for high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for performance-intensive applications. It optimizes for fast read and write operations, leveraging the LSM-tree data structure.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Includes advanced features like transactions, column families, data compression, and support for various storage engines, providing flexibility for developers to tailor it to their needs.
  • Scale and Efficiency
    Handles large volumes of data efficiently, making it suitable for applications that require significant scalability. It does this by using efficient memory and disk utilization techniques.
  • Embedded Database
    As an embedded database, it allows applications to integrate storage capabilities directly into their processes, reducing the overhead associated with connecting to a separate database service.
  • Strong Community and Support
    Developed by Facebook, RocksDB has a strong community with extensive documentation, regular updates, and active development, ensuring continuous improvement and support.

Possible disadvantages of RocksDB

  • Complex Configuration and Tuning
    RocksDB is highly configurable, which can be a double-edged sword. Properly tuning parameters for optimal performance can be complex and requires a deep understanding of the internals.
  • Limited SQL Support
    RocksDB is a key-value store and does not support SQL out of the box. This may require additional layers or integration with other systems like MySQL or MariaDB to provide SQL capabilities.
  • Memory Usage
    Performance optimizations often involve significant memory usage, which could be a limitation in environments where memory resources are constrained.
  • Lack of Built-in Replication
    While RocksDB itself does not provide built-in replication capabilities, external tools or custom solutions are necessary to achieve data replication and high availability.
  • Learning Curve
    The complexity and rich feature set of RocksDB come with a steep learning curve, especially for developers unfamiliar with LSM-tree data structures and database internals.

KeyDB videos

KeyDB on FLASH (Redis Compatible)

More videos:

  • Demo - Simple Demo of KeyDB on Flash in under 7 minutes (Drop in Redis Alternative)

RocksDB videos

How Online Backup works in MyRocks and RocksDB

More videos:

  • Review - RocksDB Meetup 2020 at Rockset
  • Review - TokuDB vs RocksDB

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to KeyDB and RocksDB)
Databases
66 66%
34% 34
Key-Value Database
74 74%
26% 26
NoSQL Databases
66 66%
34% 34
Relational Databases
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare KeyDB and RocksDB

KeyDB Reviews

Redis vs. KeyDB vs. Dragonfly vs. Skytable | Hacker News
2. KeyDB: The second is KeyDB. IIRC, I saw it in a blog post which said that it is a "multithreaded fork of Redis that is 5X faster"[1]. I really liked the idea because I was previously running several instances of Redis on the same node and proxying them like a "single-node cluster." Why? To increase CPU utilization. A single KeyDB instance could replace the unwanted...
Comparing the new Redis6 multithreaded I/O to Elasticache & KeyDB
Because of KeyDB’s multithreading and performance gains, we typically need a much larger benchmark machine than the one KeyDB is running on. We have found that a 32 core m5.8xlarge is needed to produce enough throughput with memtier. This supports throughput for up to a 16 core KeyDB instance (medium to 4xlarge)
Source: docs.keydb.dev
KeyDB: A Multithreaded Redis Fork | Hacker News
"KeyDB works by running the normal Redis event loop on multiple threads. Network IO, and query parsing are done concurrently. Each connection is assigned a thread on accept(). Access to the core hash table is guarded by spinlock. Because the hashtable access is extremely fast this lock has low contention. Transactions hold the lock for the duration of the EXEC command....

RocksDB Reviews

We have no reviews of RocksDB yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

RocksDB might be a bit more popular than KeyDB. We know about 13 links to it since March 2021 and only 10 links to KeyDB. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

KeyDB mentions (10)

  • Redis
    These facts only hold when the size of your payload and the number of connections remain relatively small. This easily jumps out the window with ever-increasing load parameters. The threshold is, unfortunately, rather low at a high number of connections and increased payload sizes. Modern large-scale micro-services will easily have over 100 running instances at medium scale. And since most instances employ some... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Introducing LMS Moodle Operator
    The LMS Moodle Operator serves as a meta-operator, orchestrating the deployment and management of Moodle instances in Kubernetes. It handles the entire stack required to run Moodle, including components like Postgres, Keydb, NFS-Ganesha, and Moodle itself. Each of these components has its own Kubernetes Operator, ensuring seamless integration and management. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Dragonfly Is Production Ready (and we raised $21M)
    Congrats on the funding and getting production ready, it's good that KeyDB (and Redis) get some competition. https://docs.keydb.dev/ Open question, how does Dragonfly differ from KeyDB? - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • I deleted 78% of my Redis container and it still works
    See: Distroless images[0] This is one of the huge benefits of recent systems languages like go and rust -- they compile to single binaries so you can use things like scatch[1] containers. You may have to fiddle with gnu libc/musl libc (usually when getaddrinfo is involved/dns etc), but once you're done with it, packaging is so easy. Even languages like Node (IMO the most progressive of the scripting languages)... - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached
    Interesting project. Very similar to KeyDB [1] which also developed a multi-threaded scale-up approach to Redis. It's since been acquired by Snapchat. There's also Aerospike [2] which has developed a lot around low-latency performance. 1. https://docs.keydb.dev/ 2. https://aerospike.com/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
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RocksDB mentions (13)

  • Introducing Gridstore: Qdrant's Custom Key-Value Store
    When we started building Qdrant, we needed to pick something ready for the task. So we chose RocksDB as our embedded key-value store. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 4: Enter The Matrix
    One thing you should know is that the K8s architecture is optimized for stateless applications, which don't store changing information within themselves and whose output depend solely on input from the user or auxiliary processes. Conduit, on the contrary, is tightly coupled with its high-performance database, RocksDB, and has stateful behavior. That's why we need to take extra care by not replicating our process... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • How to choose the right type of database
    RocksDB: A high-performance embedded database optimized for multi-core CPUs and fast storage like SSDs. Its use of a log-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) makes it suitable for applications requiring high throughput and efficient storage, such as streaming data processing. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Fast persistent recoverable log and key-value store
    [RocksDB](https://rocksdb.org/) isn’t a distributed storage system, fwiw. It’s an embedded KV engine similar to LevelDB, LMDB, or really sqlite (though that’s full SQL, not just KV). - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • The Hallucinated Rows Incident
    To output the top 3 rocks, our engine has to first store all the rocks in some sorted way. To do this, we of course picked RocksDB, an embedded lexicographically sorted key-value store, which acts as the sorting operation's persistent state. In our RocksDB state, the diffs are keyed by the value of weight, and since RocksDB is sorted, our stored diffs are automatically sorted by their weight. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing KeyDB and RocksDB, you can also consider the following products

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

memcached - High-performance, distributed memory object caching system

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

Dragonfly DB - Dragonfly - Scalable in-memory datastore made simple

Aerospike - Aerospike is a high-performing NoSQL database supporting high transaction volumes with low latency.

Apache Ignite - high-performance, integrated and distributed in-memory platform for computing and transacting on...