Category: Engineering

One of eBay’s consistent struggles, one common to all ecommerce platforms, is catching cyber attacks. These include, but are certainly not limited to, account take-overs, collusions, money laundering and more. Violations like these can cause financial or non-material loss to our buyers and sellers, as well as to eBay as a company. For this reason, […]

Introduction In a microservices architecture, services are typically integrated through remote procedure calls or asynchronous messages. The traditional way of testing microservice integration is through end-to-end integration tests. Unfortunately, the integration environments may be unstable due to external dependencies, which makes end-to-end testing brittle and less efficient. This is quite common in real-world scenarios. Another […]

Built-in functions extend the power of SQL with specific transformations of values for common needs and use cases. For example, the LOG10 function accepts a numeric input argument and returns the logarithm with base 10 as a double-precision floating-point result, and the LOWER function accepts a string and returns the result of converting each character […]

Since their initial release, SQL user-defined functions have become hugely popular among both Databricks Runtime and Databricks SQL customers. This simple yet powerful extension to SQL supports defining and re-using custom transformation logic. In this blog, we describe several enhancements we have recently made to make SQL user-defined functions even more user-friendly and powerful, along […]

eBay’s annual Machine Learning Challenge for University Students is one way that the company finds bright young minds in the fields of engineering and technology. Students are tasked with a thorny problem — last year, it was predicting shipping times — and the finest solutions find their creators rewarded with an internship.  This year, applicants […]

Introduction When shoppers come to eBay, our goal is to help them easily find a product they’ll love. Our newly launched recommendation model, commonly referred to as a “ranker,” now provides more relevant product recommendations by leveraging deep learning Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to encode item titles as semantic embeddings via a Bidirectional Encoder […]

Geospatial data has been driving innovation for centuries, through use of maps, cartography and more recently through digital content. For example, the oldest map has been found etched in a piece of mammoth tusk and dates approximately 25000 BC. This makes geospatial data one of the oldest data sources used by society to make decisions. […]

Introduction In earlier articles of this series, we covered the importance of graph networks, graph concepts, how graph visualisation makes fraud investigations easier and more effective, and how graphs for fraud detection work. In this article, we elaborate on the need for a graph service platform and how it works. In the present age, data […]

In this blog post, we introduce transpiler, a Databricks Labs open-source project that automates the translation of Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL) queries into scalable PySpark dataframe operations. This tool was developed in partnership with a large financial services customer to accelerate the migration of cybersecurity workloads into Databricks. SPL is a query language used […]

Background It might sound paradoxical to deliberately break something we’re trying to fix, but sometimes, that’s the most efficient method to do it. Fault injection is the process by which we deliberately introduce faults into the system. We can observe the system behavior with the injected faults to identify the weakness of the system. Within […]