Mimir vs Redis
A detailed comparison
Compare Mimir and Redis for time series and OLAP workloads
Learn About Time Series DatabasesChoosing the right database is a critical choice when building any software application. All databases have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to performance, so deciding which database has the most benefits and the most minor downsides for your specific use case and data model is an important decision. Below you will find an overview of the key concepts, architecture, features, use cases, and pricing models of Mimir and Redis so you can quickly see how they compare against each other.
The primary purpose of this article is to compare how Mimir and Redis perform for workloads involving time series data, not for all possible use cases. Time series data typically presents a unique challenge in terms of database performance. This is due to the high volume of data being written and the query patterns to access that data. This article doesn’t intend to make the case for which database is better; it simply provides an overview of each database so you can make an informed decision.
Mimir vs Redis Breakdown
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 |
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| Database Model | Time series database |
In-memory database |
| Architecture | Grafana Mimir is a time series database designed for high-performance, real-time monitoring, and analytics. It features a distributed architecture, allowing for horizontal scaling across multiple nodes to handle large volumes of data and queries. It can be deployed on-prem due to being open source or as a managed solution hosted by Grafana |
Redis can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or as a managed service |
| License | APGL 3.0 |
BSD 3 |
| Use Cases | Monitoring, observability, IoT |
Caching, message brokering, real-time analytics, session storage, geospatial data processing |
| Scalability | Horizontally scalable |
Horizontally scalable via partitioning and clustering, supports data replication |
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Mimir Overview
Grafana Mimir is an open-source software project that provides a scalable long-term storage solution for Prometheus. Started at Grafana Labs and announced in 2022, Grafana Mimir aims to become the most scalable and performant open-source time series database for metrics. The project incorporates the knowledge and experience gained by Grafana Labs engineers from running Grafana Enterprise Metrics and Grafana Cloud Metrics at massive scale.
Redis Overview
Redis, which stands for Remote Dictionary Server, is an open-source, in-memory data structure store that can be used as a database, cache, and message broker. It was created by Salvatore Sanfilippo in 2009 and has since gained significant popularity due to its high performance and flexibility. Redis supports various data structures, such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, and geospatial indexes with radius queries.
Mimir for Time Series Data
Grafana Mimir is well-suited for handling time series data, making it a suitable choice for scenarios involving metric storage and analysis. It provides long-term storage capabilities for Prometheus, a popular open-source monitoring and alerting system. With Grafana Mimir, users can store and query time series metrics over extended periods, allowing for historical analysis and trend detection. It is especially useful for applications that require scalable and performant storage of time series data for metrics monitoring and observability purposes.
Redis for Time Series Data
Redis has a dedicated module for working with time series data called RedisTimeSeries. RedisTimeSeries offers functionality like downsampling, data retention policies, and specialized queries for time series data in Redis. Being an in-memory database, Redis will be very fast for reading and writing time series data, but due to the cost of RAM compared to disk using Redis could become expensive depending on the size of your dataset. If your use case doesn’t require extremely fast response times, you could save money by going with a more traditional time series database.
Mimir Key Concepts
- Metrics: In Grafana Mimir, metrics represent the measurements or observations tracked over time. They can include various types of data, such as system metrics, application performance metrics, or sensor data.
- Long-term Storage: Grafana Mimir provides a storage solution specifically tailored for long-term retention of time series data, allowing users to store and query historical metrics over extended periods.
- Microservices: Grafana Mimir adopts a microservices-based architecture, where the system consists of multiple horizontally scalable microservices that can operate independently and in parallel.
Redis Key Concepts
- In-memory store: Redis stores data in memory, which allows for faster data access and manipulation compared to disk-based databases .
- Data structures: Redis supports a wide range of data structures, including strings, hashes, lists, sets, and more, which provide flexibility in how data is modeled and stored.
- Persistence: Redis offers optional data persistence, allowing data to be periodically saved to disk or written to a log for durability.
- Pub/Sub: Redis provides a publish/subscribe messaging system, enabling real-time communication between clients without the need for a centralized message broker.
Mimir Architecture
Grafana Mimir adopts a microservices-based architecture, where the system comprises multiple horizontally scalable microservices. These microservices can operate independently and in parallel, allowing for efficient distribution of workload and scalability. Grafana Mimir’s components are compiled into a single binary, providing a unified and cohesive system. The architecture is designed to be highly available and multi-tenant, enabling multiple users and applications to utilize the database concurrently. This distributed architecture ensures scalability and resilience in handling large-scale metric storage and retrieval scenarios.
Redis Architecture
Redis is a NoSQL database that uses a key-value data model, where each key is associated with a value stored as one of Redis’ supported data structures. The database is single-threaded, which simplifies its internal architecture and reduces contention. Redis can be deployed as a standalone server, a cluster, or a master-replica setup for scalability and high availability. The Redis Cluster mode automatically shards data across multiple nodes, providing data partitioning and fault tolerance.
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Mimir Features
Scalability
Grafana Mimir is designed to scale horizontally, enabling the system to handle growing data volumes and increasing workloads. Its horizontally scalable microservices architecture allows for seamless expansion and improved performance.
High Availability
Grafana Mimir provides high availability by ensuring redundancy and fault tolerance. It allows for replication and distribution of data across multiple nodes, ensuring data durability and continuous availability of stored metrics.
Long-term Storage
Grafana Mimir offers a dedicated solution for long-term storage of time series metrics. It provides efficient storage and retrieval mechanisms, allowing users to retain and analyze historical metric data over extended periods.
Redis Features
Atomicity
Redis supports atomic operations on complex data types, allowing developers to perform powerful operations without worrying about race conditions or other concurrent processing issues.
Broad data structure support
Redis supports a range of data structures such as lists, sets, sorted sets, hashes, bitmaps, hyperloglog, and geospatial indexes. This flexibility allows developers to use Redis for a wide variety of tasks by using data structures that are optimized for their data in terms of performance characteristics.
Pub/Sub messaging
Redis provides a publish/subscribe messaging system for real-time communication between clients.
Lua Scripting
Developers can run Lua scripts in the Redis server, enabling complex operations to be executed atomically in the server itself, reducing network round trips.
Mimir Use Cases
Metrics Monitoring and Observability
Grafana Mimir is well-suited for monitoring and observability use cases. It enables the storage and analysis of time series metrics, allowing users to monitor the performance, health, and behavior of their systems and applications in real-time.
Long Term Metric Storage
With its focus on providing scalable long-term storage, Grafana Mimir is ideal for applications that require retaining and analyzing historical metric data over extended periods. It allows users to store and query large volumes of time series data generated by Prometheus.
Trend and anomaly detection
By using Mimir for storing long term historical data it can be useful for detecting trends in your metrics and also for comparing current metrics to historical data to detect outliers and anomalies
Redis Use Cases
Caching
Redis is often used as a cache to store frequently accessed data and reduce the load on other databases or services, improving application performance and reducing latency.
Task queues
Redis can be used to implement task queues, which are useful for managing tasks that take longer to process and should be executed asynchronously. This is particularly common in web applications, where background tasks can be processed independently of the request/response cycle
Real-time analysis and machine learning
Redis’ high performance and low-latency data access make it suitable for real-time analysis and machine learning applications, such as processing streaming data, media streaming, and handling time-series data. This can be achieved using Redis’ data structures and capabilities like sorted sets, timestamps, and pub/sub messaging.
Mimir Pricing Model
Grafana Mimir is an open-source project, which means it is freely available for usage and does not require any licensing fees. Users can download the source code and deploy Grafana Mimir on their own infrastructure without incurring direct costs. However, it’s important to consider the operational costs associated with hosting and maintaining the database infrastructure.
Redis Pricing Model
Redis is open-source software, which means it can be deployed and used freely on your own infrastructure. However, there are also managed Redis services available, such as Redis Enterprise which offer additional features, support, and ease of deployment. Pricing for these services typically depends on factors like the size of the instance, data storage, and data transfer.
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