On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial that helps you integrate a tool from the the NoSQL movement - Redis - into your application. This tutorial shows you how to add this powerful, fast database as a general content store for your application.

NoSQL is all the rage for Web developers who are tired of building complex SQL. Redis, a NoSQL database server much like Cassandra or MongoDB, provides a powerful and speedy alternative to relational database servers for PHP developers. Redis is similar to Memcached in terms of speed, but the data isn't volatile. That means that when your server reboots, your Redis data will still be there. You can back it up too.

Installing the server for Redis is easy (if you use a package management system) and getting up and running with PHP is as easy as using one of the PHP connection libraries out there like Rediska. In his example he shows one of the most basic operations - storing string values, appending to them and pulling them back out based on their unique key.