SWAPDB command.
This new command swaps two Redis databases, so that immediately all the clients connected to a given DB will see the data of the other DB, and the other way around. Example: SWAPDB 0 1 This will swap DB 0 with DB 1. All the clients connected with DB 0 will immediately see the new data, exactly like all the clients connected with DB 1 will see the data that was formerly of DB 0. MOTIVATION AND HISTORY --- The command was recently demanded by Pedro Melo, but was suggested in the past multiple times, and always refused by me. The reason why it was asked: Imagine you have clients operating in DB 0. At the same time, you create a new version of the dataset in DB 1. When the new version of the dataset is available, you immediately want to swap the two views, so that the clients will transparently use the new version of the data. At the same time you'll likely destroy the DB 1 dataset (that contains the old data) and start to build a new version, to repeat the process. This is an interesting pattern, but the reason why I always opposed to implement this, was that FLUSHDB was a blocking command in Redis before Redis 4.0 improvements. Now we have FLUSHDB ASYNC that releases the old data in O(1) from the point of view of the client, to reclaim memory incrementally in a different thread. At this point, the pattern can really be supported without latency spikes, so I'm providing this implementation for the users to comment. In case a very compelling argument will be made against this new command it may be removed. BEHAVIOR WITH BLOCKING OPERATIONS --- If a client is blocking for a list in a given DB, after the swap it will still be blocked in the same DB ID, since this is the most logical thing to do: if I was blocked for a list push to list "foo", even after the swap I want still a LPUSH to reach the key "foo" in the same DB in order to unblock. However an interesting thing happens when a client is, for instance, blocked waiting for new elements in list "foo" of DB 0. Then the DB 0 and 1 are swapped with SWAPDB. However the DB 1 happened to have a list called "foo" containing elements. When this happens, this implementation can correctly unblock the client. It is possible that there are subtle corner cases that are not covered in the implementation, but since the command is self-contained from the POV of the implementation and the Redis core, it cannot cause anything bad if not used. Tests and documentation are yet to be provided.
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