Network Programming in .NET

Redis is an in-memory database, designed for ultra-fast data retrieval. It’s great for short-lived data, that perhaps you only need to store for the duration of a user session, or transaction.

The AWS version, of Redis, under the name “ElasticCache” can only be accessed from within the AWS network, or specifically the Redis VPC. This is obviously designed to enforce recommended usage. You get no performance advantage if your Web server needs to traverse the Internet to reach your Redis server.

Here, I’ve used RedisCloud Hosted Redis database, rather than a local installation. But it has the advantage that it can be accessed from anywhere. Good for development, not designed for production. The key is in plain text, feel free to mess about with the server.

So, this was my use case: I wanted to store data temporarily, just for 2 seconds, and then delete it. It’s actually rather non-trivial with a standard MySQL database to do this in a scaleable way.

So, step 1 is to import a client library, here I picked StackExchange.Redis;

Install-Package StackExchange.Redis

Now, I connect to the Redis server, and write a value that will expire in 2 seconds;

const string endpoint = "redis-15557.c72.eu-west-1-2.ec2.cloud.redislabs.com:15557,password=JU455eaOlQZjVYExorUl1oFouO509Ptu";
var redis = ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect(endpoint);
var db = redis.GetDatabase();

const string setValue = "abcdefg";
db.StringSet("mykey", setValue, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2));
    

If I read the value back instantly, I get the expected value of “abcdefg”. If I wait 3 seconds and try to read again, I get null;

string getValue = db.StringGet("mykey");
Console.WriteLine(getValue); // writes: "abcdefg"
Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(3));
string getValue2 = db.StringGet("mykey");
Console.WriteLine(getValue2); // writes nothing

The code is available to clone here; https://github.com/infiniteloopltd/RedisTest