Redis has been a great investment for our organization as we needed a solution for high speed data caching. The ramp up and integration was quite easy. Redis handles automatic failover internally, so no crashes provides high availability. On the fly scaling scale to more/less cores and memory as and when needed.
Titan is definitely a good choice, but it has its learning curve. The documentation may lack in places, and you might have to muster answers from different sources and technologies. But at its core, it does the job of storing and querying graph databases really well. Remember that titan itself is not the whole component, but utilizes other technologies like cassandra, gremlin, tinkerpop, etc to do many other things, and each of them has a learning curve. I would recommend titan for a team, but not for a single person. For single developer, go with Neo4j.
Easy for developers to understand. Unlike Riak, which I've used in the past, it's fast without having to worry about eventual consistency.
Reliable. With a proper multi-node configuration, it can handle failover instantly.
Configurable. We primarily still use Memcache for caching but one of the teams uses Redis for both long-term storage and temporary expiry keys without taking on another external dependency.
Fast. We process tens of thousands of RPS and it doesn't skip a beat.
We had some difficulty scaling Redis without it becoming prohibitively expensive.
Redis has very simple search capabilities, which means its not suitable for all use cases.
Redis doesn't have good native support for storing data in object form and many libraries built over it return data as a string, meaning you need build your own serialization layer over it.
The community is lacking deep documentation. I had to spend many nights trying to figure many things on my own. As graph databases will grow popular, I am sure this will be improved.
Not enough community support. Even in SO you might not find many questions. Though there are some users in SO who quickly answer graph database questions. Need more support.
We will definitely continue using Redis because: 1. It is free and open source. 2. We already use it in so many applications, it will be hard for us to let go. 3. There isn't another competitive product that we know of that gives a better performance. 4. We never had any major issues with Redis, so no point turning our backs.
It is quite simple to set up for the purpose of managing user sessions in the backend. It can be easily integrated with other products or technologies, such as Spring in Java. If you need to actually display the data stored in Redis in your application this is a bit difficult to understand initially but is possible.
The support team has always been excellent in handling our mostly questions, rarely problems. They are responsive, find the solution and get us moving forward again. I have never had to escalate a case with them. They have always solved our problems in a very timely manner. I highly commend the support team.
We are big users of MySQL and PostgreSQL. We were looking at replacing our aging web page caching technology and found that we could do it in SQL, but there was a NoSQL movement happening at the time. We dabbled a bit in the NoSQL scene just to get an idea of what it was about and whether it was for us. We tried a bunch, but I can only seem to remember Mongo and Couch. Mongo had big issues early on that drove us to Redis and we couldn't quite figure out how to deploy couch.
To be honest, titan is not as popular as Neo4j, though they do the same thing. In my personal opinion, titan has lot of potential, but Neo4j is easier to use. If the organization is big enough, it might choose titan because of its open source nature, and high scalability, but Neo4j comes with a lot of enterprise and community support, better query, better documentation, better instructions, and is also backed by leading tech companies. But titan is very strong when you consider standards. Titan follows gremlin and tinkerpop, both of which will be huge in future as more graph database vendors join the market. If things go really well, maybe Neo4j might have to support gremlin as well.
Redis has helped us increase our throughput and server data to a growing amount of traffic while keeping our app fast. We couldn't have grown without the ability to easily cache data that Redis provides.
Redis has helped us decrease the load on our database. By being able to scale up and cache important data, we reduce the load on our database reducing costs and infra issues.
Running a Redis node on something like AWS can be costly, but it is often a requirement for scaling a company. If you need data quickly and your business is already a positive ROI, Redis is worth the investment.
