How Shopify Uses SQL

This article discusses the horizontal scaling of the Rails backend for the Shop app using Vitess, a database system abstraction over MySQL.

The article discusses the concept of monkey patching in Ruby, highlighting its dangers and advocating for its limited use.

The article discusses the release of ShopifyQL Notebooks, a self-serve tool designed to help merchants explore and understand their business metrics through a new query language, ShopifyQL.

The article discusses the complexities of tax compliance for U. S. merchants and details the development of Shopify's Tax Insights feature.

The article discusses the use of Monte Carlo simulations to extract meaningful insights from sampled success metrics, particularly in scenarios where direct measurement is impractical.

The article discusses how a team at Shopify discovered a query in BigQuery that could potentially cost them nearly $1 million per month and outlines the steps they took to reduce this cost signific...

This article discusses the safe addition of NOT NULL columns to database tables, focusing on the use of the Large Hadron Migrator (LHM) gem for schema changes in MySQL databases.

This article discusses the development of iOS widgets at Shopify, focusing on the importance of widgets for merchants, the decision to use SwiftUI over React Native, and the challenges faced during...

The article discusses the concept of a Full Stack Data Scientist, highlighting their role in managing the entire data science lifecycle from discovery to deployment.

The article explores the performance advantages of Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation compared to traditional ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, particularly in dynamic languages like Ruby.

Shopify introduces ShopifyQL, a new querying language designed to make data exploration accessible for Shopify Plus merchants.

The article discusses the experiences and lessons learned from running Apache Airflow at scale within Shopify.

This article discusses how the Payment Flexibility team at Shopify redefined the storage of polymorphic associations in Rails by transitioning from storing class names to arbitrary strings.

This article discusses the recent MySQL upgrade at Shopify, detailing the motivations behind the upgrade, the challenges faced during the process, and the internal tools developed to streamline fut...

This article provides ten essential tips for building resilient payment systems, drawing from the author's extensive experience at Shopify.

Shopify's Data Reliability team developed custom verification, benchmarking, and profiling tooling to enhance Trino query execution speed and reliability.

The article discusses Shopify's efforts to enhance the performance of Trino, a distributed SQL query engine, to provide faster query execution times for data scientists.

The article discusses the implementation and management of dynamic ProxySQL query rules at Shopify, focusing on their importance for database resiliency and performance.

The article discusses Shopify's experience with integrating React Native into their mobile development process, particularly focusing on the management of native code.

This article provides a comprehensive guide on building a web application using Ruby, both with and without Rails libraries.

The article discusses the implementation of double entry transition tables at Shopify to effectively track state changes for merchants using Shopify Balance.

The article provides four essential tips for shipping data products quickly, emphasizing the importance of design sprints, prototyping, avoiding complex machine learning in early iterations, and en...

The article discusses how Shopify's Test Infrastructure team significantly improved the speed of their Continuous Integration (CI) system, reducing the 95th percentile build time from 45 minutes to...

The article discusses the challenges and solutions related to read consistency when using database replicas at Shopify.

This article provides a comprehensive guide on creating user-centered, impact-driven dashboards using a product thinking approach.

This article discusses the optimization of Shopify's server-side storefront rendering engine, focusing on techniques such as simplifying data access, implementing caching layers, and reducing memor...

This article discusses how Shopify's Data Platform Engineering team scaled their data platform to handle the unprecedented data volume during Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM).

This article discusses the development of Seamster, a production-grade SQL modeling workflow created by Shopify to improve data reporting efficiency.

The article discusses how Shopify improved database efficiency by introducing composite primary keys in their Rails application.

The article discusses the importance of building mental models to enhance understanding and decision-making in engineering and management.

This article outlines the process of building an email experimentation pipeline from scratch, addressing the challenges faced by Shopify's data teams in conducting A/B tests for external channels.

The article discusses the practice of tophatting in React Native at Shopify, emphasizing its importance in ensuring software quality through manual testing of code changes.

The article discusses how to track historical state using Type 2 dimensional models in application databases, contrasting it with the traditional Type 1 dimension approach.

The article discusses Shopify's initiative to rewrite its Storefront Renderer from scratch to enhance the performance of online storefronts.

The article discusses Shopify's Data Science & Engineering foundations, emphasizing the importance of structured data management and collaboration within the organization.

The article outlines seven effective strategies to make SQL workshops more accessible for beginners, particularly those with little to no prior experience in SQL or data tools.

The article outlines Shopify's evolution in managing TLS certificates, detailing the transition from manual provisioning to a fully automated system that now serves over 1 million merchants.

The article features Sam Saffron discussing performance and monitoring in Ruby, particularly focusing on the challenges and strategies for improving Ruby's performance.

This article discusses five common data stores—Relational Database, Non-Relational (NoSQL) Database, Key-Value Store, Full-Text Search Engine, and Message Queue—highlighting their characteristics a...

This article discusses strategies for writing fast code in Ruby on Rails, focusing on performance optimization techniques in Active Record, Rails, and Ruby.

The article provides a comprehensive review of Shopify's Bug Bounty program in 2019, highlighting key improvements, statistics, and insights gained from peer collaborations.

The article discusses the challenges of traditional pagination using incremental page numbers and introduces relative cursor pagination as a more efficient alternative.

The article highlights the experiences and insights of three female developers at Shopify, focusing on self-advocacy and overcoming adversity in the technology industry.

This article details how an intern at Shopify successfully freed up 3 terabytes of storage in preparation for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) by implementing a background job to delete unnecessary...

The article critiques the common association between RESTful design and CRUD operations, particularly in the context of Rails applications.