[AWebOfBrown]

This doesn't sound like the worst way to reduce expensive reads of normalised data. Is the implication that it should have been solved with views, was incorrectly normalised, or that a document/key-value store should have been used other than Redis?

Edit: I suppose a hypothetical can go many ways, it could be a poor data access pattern. What was the root cause in some of your experiences?

[vorpalhex]

If your data model is too slow to work for your use cases, your data model is wrong. If your data model can't be indexed by your data store, your data model or your data store is wrong. If you're storing large amounts of performance sensitive normalized key-value data in a column based SQL database, again something has gone terrible wrong.