Valkey 9.1 Adds Database-Level Access Control and Cuts Per-Key Memory Overhead
The Redis fork's latest release focuses on tightening permissions and shrinking the memory cost of storing data at scale.
The Valkey community released version 9.1.0 on May 19, 2026, the latest release of the in-memory data store that forked from Redis after Redis's 2024 license change. The release credits contributions from more than eighty people working on security, observability, performance, efficiency, and tooling.
The headline feature is database-level access control, which lets administrators restrict which commands a given user may run on a per-database basis rather than only at the server or key level. For teams running multiple logical databases inside a single Valkey instance -- a common pattern for multi-tenant deployments -- this closes a real gap: previously, tightly scoping a user's permissions to just the database or databases they actually needed meant working around coarser-grained controls.
On efficiency, Valkey 9.1 cuts per-key memory overhead substantially: up to 44 percent less overhead for strings, and up to 8.5 fewer bytes per member in sorted sets. At the scale Valkey is typically deployed -- millions or billions of keys -- overhead reductions at the per-key level translate into meaningfully lower memory costs across an entire fleet, without requiring any change to how an application reads or writes data.
The release also adds structured JSON logging, a modularized approach to the Lua scripting support built into the server, and a round of TLS-related updates alongside general performance improvements. A follow-up security release, 9.1.1, shipped July 21, 2026.
Valkey's continued release cadence is itself part of the ongoing story of the Redis-Valkey split: since Redis reversed course and returned to an open-source AGPLv3 license in May 2025, the two projects have continued to develop in parallel under Linux Foundation governance for Valkey, with cloud providers including AWS ElastiCache and Google Memorystore now provisioning Valkey rather than Redis for new managed-cache clusters.
Source: Valkey Blog — Valkey 9.1 delivers improvements in security, performance, and more