What is the purpose of colons within Redis keys

Question

I\'m learning how to use Redis for a project of mine. One thing I haven\'t got my head around is what exactly the colons are used for in the names of keys.

I have seen n

Answer 1

The colons have been in earlier redis versions as a concept for storing namespaced data. In early versions redis supported only strings, if you wanted to store the email and the age of 'bob' you had to store it all as a string, so colons were used:

SET user:bob:email bob@example.com
SET user:bob:age 31

They had no special handling or performance characteristics in redis, the only purpose was namespacing the data to find it again. Nowadays you can use hashes to store most of the coloned keys:

 HSET user:bob email bob@example.com
 HSET user:bob age 31

You don't have to name the hash "user:bob" we could name it "bob", but namespacing it with the user-prefix we instantly know which information this hash should/could have.