Data Storage
Omnichannel Retail Data Storage Layer
Core Data Stores
Tulip’s Retail Data Layer is the base layer of Tulip’s Cloud. In this layer, Tulip stores structured retail data at scale.
At its core, Tulip utilizes an extensible data store that uses a modern multi-prong approach for managing data, including:
- An operational data store for core data
- In-memory databases for real-time processing and access to data
- A search service that indexes and allows search across core data entities
- An image server over CDN for indexing cached static content, especially product images
- A big data database for data warehousing and analytics
- A mobile analytics service to store app usage data
Standard Data Entities
Tulip is able to store a large variety of data in the Tulip Cloud. Examples of standardized data that is stored in Tulip include:
Catalogs | Users | Variants |
Product Categories | Products | Customers |
Inventory | Prices | Loyalty Tiers |
Messages | Customer Notes | Tasks |
Countries | Currencies | Employees |
Stores | Orders | …and more! |
See Tulip’s API Documentation to get a good overview of the different data types that can be stored in Tulip.
Data Extensibility
Tulip allows customizations on most core data objects using extended attributes. These are indexed key-value pairs per data entity that can be added to any core data entity. For example, a product may have an extended attribute of “color” which could have the value “red”, even though color is not a standard field within Tulip’s standard product data object.
See documentation on extending Data Entities in Tulip for details.
External IDs and Tulip ID
For most data entities in Tulip, Tulip stores an internal Tulip ID that is the primary field that identifies an object. Tulip also provides a field per entity called the “External ID” which allows retailers to store a unique identifier that maps this field back to an external system. For example, in a situation where a retailer connects Tulip’s customer records to an external CRM, this retailer can store the external CRM ID in Tulip. Tulip allows most get and set operations to be done either by using the external ID or the Tulip ID in order to make it easy to keep records with external systems in synch.
See Understanding Record IDs - Internal vs. External for details.