The string data type in the db? Because Redis itself uses char-stars all over the place, with the libc string functions.

Hmm, reading the source it looks like he is using His sds string library, which has Len, size and a asciiz char* member. When last I checked he does pass the char* around (because it is null terminated) but he also sometimes will do pointer math to get back to the sds

You're right; I was reacting to the count of char\s+star and snprintf calls, but only fair to chalk Redis up among the packages I have that rely on a high-level string library.