Five Common Data Stores and When to Use Them - Shopify

This post provides an overview of five common data store types: Relational Databases (MySQL), Non-relational Databases (Document Stores like MongoDB, Wide Column Stores like Cassandra/Bigtable), Key-Value Stores (Redis, Memcached), Full-Text Search Engines (Elasticsearch), and Message Queues (Kafka). It details their characteristics, use cases, and Shopify's specific usage of MySQL, Bigtable, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, and Kafka. The post emphasizes the durability and ACID properties of relational databases for business-critical data, the flexibility and scalability of NoSQL for large or unstructured data, the performance of in-memory key-value stores for caching, the specialized text-searching capabilities of search engines, and the reliable data transfer of message queues.