From: antirez <antirez@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 14:23:09 +0000 (+0200)
Subject: New commands: BITOP and BITCOUNT.
X-Git-Url: https://git.saurik.com/redis.git/commitdiff_plain/0bd6d68e34bc41cd80cd7fc44aab9cf3884de8dc?ds=sidebyside;hp=0bd6d68e34bc41cd80cd7fc44aab9cf3884de8dc

New commands: BITOP and BITCOUNT.

The motivation for this new commands is to be search in the usage of
Redis for real time statistics. See the article "Fast real time metrics
using Redis".

http://blog.getspool.com/2011/11/29/fast-easy-realtime-metrics-using-redis-bitmaps/

In general Redis strings when used as bitmaps using the SETBIT/GETBIT
command provide a very space-efficient and fast way to store statistics.
For instance in a web application with users, every user can be
associated with a key that shows every day in which the user visited the
web service. This information can be really valuable to extract user
behaviour information.

With Redis bitmaps doing this is very simple just saying that a given
day is 0 (the data the service was put online) and all the next days are
1, 2, 3, and so forth. So with SETBIT it is possible to set the bit
corresponding to the current day every time the user visits the site.

It is possible to take the count of the bit sets on the run, this is
extremely easy using a Lua script. However a fast bit count native
operation can be useful, especially if it can operate on ranges, or when
the string is small like in the case of days (even if you consider many
years it is still extremely little data).

For this reason BITOP was introduced. The command counts the number of
bits set to 1 in a string, with optional range:

BITCOUNT key [start end]

The start/end parameters are similar to GETRANGE. If omitted the whole
string is tested.

Population counting is more useful when bit-level operations like AND,
OR and XOR are avaialble. For instance I can test multiple users to see
the number of days three users visited the site at the same time. To do
this we can take the AND of all the bitmaps, and then count the set bits.

For this reason the BITOP command was introduced:

BITOP [AND|OR|XOR|NOT] dest_key src_key1 src_key2 src_key3 ... src_keyN

In the special case of NOT (that inverts the bits) only one source key
can be passed.

The judicious use of BITCOUNT and BITOP combined can lead to interesting
use cases with very space efficient representation of data.

The implementation provided is still not tested and optimized for speed,
next commits will introduce unit tests. Later the implementation will be
profiled to see if it is possible to gain an important amount of speed
without making the code much more complex.
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