This week, Redis 2.8.9 was released, and according to creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, it's a strange one. Unlike most Redis releases, 2.8.9 that adds big new features, but no bug fixes at all, which, according to Sanfilippo, is just because there was nothing to fix. That's always good to hear.

The new features are as follows:

• A new data structure called the HyperLogLog
  
• New commands for the sorted data set structure to support lexicographical range queries:
• ZRANGEBYLEX
• ZLEXCOUNT
• ZREMRANGEBYLEX

While the release is a bit unusual, Sanfilippo suggests that it's a sign of big changes to come:

Now it is time to focus again on Redis Cluster and Sentinel for the next months, but I hope Redis 2.8.9 is sending a signal to the Redis community that we are not going to turn into a different thing. Redis Cluster will be a feature like Redis persistence or replication are, but the Redis project main goal is to provide a core of easy to exploit in-memory data structures.

Check out the full announcement for more details on Redis 2.8.9.