Is Tarantool just a cache?

Question

Like the title says - is it just a cache? What about persistence? What about storing on disk?

A lot of times there can be a wrong idea that Tarantool is just a different version of Memcached.

Answer 1

A simple answer - Tarantool is not just a cache. Historically it was created to cache hot data for a social network, yes. But since then 10 years have passed and a lot have changed in Tarantool.

Tarantool is an in-memory data platform. Sounds fancy, but in simpler terms it is an in-memory DB + a built-in Lua application server.

• Tarantool is a multi paradigm DB: it supports key-value, document and relational models.
• It is fully persistent. There a regular snapshots to disk and there is a WAL.
• You can have as many secondary indexes as you want.
• You can write stored procedures in Lua
• Tarantool supports sync and async replication and sharding out of the box