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Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

jepsen.io

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Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#11

Post by jorangreef »

diggan wrote: post #8
jorangreef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joran, creator and CEO from TigerBeetle here! At a national level, we’re working with the Gates Foundation to integrate TigerBeetle into their non-profit central bank switch that will be powering Rwanda’s National Digital Payments System 2.0 later this year [1]. At an enterprise level, TigerBeetle already powers customers processing 100M+ transactions per month in production, and we recently signed our first $2B fint…

> some of the founders of Clear Street, a fairly large brokerage on Wall Street have since invested [3] in TigerBeetle "Invested" in terms of "giving you money" or in terms of "Now uses the database themselves"? I read it as the first, but I think the question is about usage, not investments.

Both. In terms of investing and planning to migrate.

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#13

Post by nindalf »

jorangreef wrote: post #10
koakuma-chan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TigerBeetle itself and their testing suite looks impressive, but putting Primeagen there makes them look like Next.js or Cursor.

That’s a talk for engineers that was streamed on the Primeagen and went a bit viral. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s an intro to TigerBeetle technically. Otherwise check out https://tigerbeetle.com/company if you want more about the corporate side.

If you can stand that guy speak, it's worth a watch.

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#14

Post by jorangreef »

Ygg2 wrote: post #12

TigerBeetle is impressive, but it's a single purpose DB. Unless you fit within the account ledger model it's extremely restrictive.

Joran from TigerBeetle here!

Yes, TigerBeetle specializes only for transaction processing (OLTP). It’s not a general-purpose (OLGP) DBMS.

That said, we have customers from energy to gaming, and of course fintech.

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#15

Post by diggan »

jorangreef wrote: post #11
diggan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some of the founders of Clear Street, a fairly large brokerage on Wall Street have since invested [3] in TigerBeetle "Invested" in terms of "giving you money" or in terms of "Now uses the database themselves"? I read it as the first, but I think the question is about usage, not investments.

Both. In terms of investing and planning to migrate.

Thanks for the clarification :)

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#16

Post by jorangreef »

nindalf wrote: post #3

Very impressed with this report. Whenever I read TigerBeetle's claims on reliability and scalability, I'd think "ok, let's wait for the Jepsen report". This report found a number of issues, which might be a cause for concern. But I think it's a positive because they didn't just fix the issues, they've expanded their internal test suite to catch similar bugs in future. With such an approach to engineering I feel like…

Thanks!

Yes, we have around 6,000+ assertions in TigerBeetle. A few of these were overtight, hence some of the crashes. But those were the assertions doing their job, alerting us that we needed to adjust our mental model, which we did.

Otherwise, apart from a small correctness bug in an internal testing feature we added (only in our Java client and only for Jepsen to facilitate the audit) there was only one correctness bug found by Jepsen, and it didn’t affect durability. We’ve written about it here: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-06-06-fuzzer-blind-spots-m...

Finally, to be fair, TigerBeetle can (and is tested) to survive more faults than Postgres can, since it was designed with an explicit storage fault model and using research that was not available at the time when Postgres was released in ‘96. TB’s fault models are further tested with Deterministic Simulation Testing and we use techniques such as static memory allocation following NASA’s Power of Ten Rules for Safety-Critical Code. There are known scenarios in the literature that will cause Postgres to lose data, which TigerBeetle can detect and recover from.

For more on this, see the section in Kyle’s report on helical fault injection (most Raft and Paxos implementations were not designed to survive this) as well as a talk we gave at QCon London: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_jfOk4L7CiY

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#17

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

nindalf wrote: post #3

Very impressed with this report. Whenever I read TigerBeetle's claims on reliability and scalability, I'd think "ok, let's wait for the Jepsen report". This report found a number of issues, which might be a cause for concern. But I think it's a positive because they didn't just fix the issues, they've expanded their internal test suite to catch similar bugs in future. With such an approach to engineering I feel like…

I always get excited to read Kyle’s write ups. I feel like I level up my distributed systems knowledge every time he puts something out.

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#20

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

Ygg2 wrote: post #12

TigerBeetle is impressive, but it's a single purpose DB. Unless you fit within the account ledger model it's extremely restrictive.

That is 100% correct. You use TigerBeetle when you need a really good double entry accounting system that is open source. You wouldn’t use it for much else other than that. Which makes it great software, it’s purpose made to solve one problem really well
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