The newly formed Microsoft Open Technologies subsidiary has shunned the red carpet and cocktail party circuit opting instead to push out some solid product updates as one of its first formalized actions. The division has updated the Redis open source, advanced key-value store.

NOTE: Also referred to as a data structure server, a key-value store is commonly used by an application developer to store schema-less data that usually consists of a string representing the key and the actual data considered to be the value element in the "key-value" relationship.

Initially sponsored by VMware, principal program manager for Microsoft Open Technologies Claudio Caldato called the new release of Redis a "major improvement" in terms of its ability to save data to disk.

"Redis on Linux uses an OS feature called Fork/Copy On Write. This feature is not available on Windows, so we had to find a way to be able to mimic the same behavior without changing completely the save-on-disk process so as to avoid any future integration issues with the Redis code," wrote Caldato, on a Microsoft blog.

Microsoft says it will now continue working with the community to create a solid Windows port. "While we pursue stabilization, we are keeping the older version as default/stable on the GitHub repository," Caldato said.