How do you mix SQL DB vs. Key-Value store (i.e. Redis)

Answer 1

When you say "I spend a tremendous amount of time" do you mean this is a lot of development time, or are you referring to computing time?

Personally I'd be wary of mixing a RDBMS with a non-RDBMS solution, because this will probably create problems when the two different paradigms clash.

Answer 2

Now that the actual problem is more defined (i.e. you spend a lot of time writing repetitive conversion code to move from one layer/representation to the next) maybe you could consider writing (or googling for) something that automatizes this, maybe?

Googles returns plenty of results for "convert table to XML" (and the reverse), would this help? Would something going directly from table to key/value pairs be better? Have you tried tackling this problem in a generalized way?

Answer 3

You may want to take a look at MongoDB. It works with JSON style objects, and comes with SQL like indexing & querying. Redis is more suitable for storing data structures likes lists & sets, when you want a simple lookup instead of a complex query.