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Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

jepsen.io

21–30 of 88 posts

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#21

Curios if they got any large bank or stock exchange to use TigerBeetle

Not a bank or exchange but I work for a very large fintech and we are using it on our newer products.

Awesome to hear that! Are we chatting in Slack? Or please DM me or Lewis. Would love to chat!

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually love the pace at which Prime speaks, but I feel awkward at hearing my own voice. Hopefully the ideas stand on merit!

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#23

The articles link to the paper about "Viewstamped Replication" is unfortunately broken ( https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf connection refused). I think it should be http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf (http scheme not https) ? And now I have some Friday evening reading material.

It should be fixed soon!

The VSR 2012 paper is one of my favorites as is “Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage”, which is so powerful.

Hope you enjoy the read!

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#26
Really happy to see TigerBeetle live up to its claims as verified by aphyr - because it's good to see that when you take the right approach, you get the right results.

Question about how people end up using TigerBeetle. There's presumably a lot of external systems and other databases around a TigerBeetle install for everything that isn't an Account or Transfer. What's the typical pattern for those less reliable systems to square up to TigerBeetle, especially to recover from consistency issues between the two?

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#27

If memory serves, TigerBeetle is/was not free for production? I can't find the Pricing page, but I kinda remember reading about it somewhere (or it was implied) a while back.

The DBMS is Apache 2.0 and our customers pay us (well) for everything else to run, integrate, migrate, operate and support that.

For more on our open source thinking and how this is orthogonal to business model (and product!), see our interview with the Changelog: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr8Y2EYnxJs

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#28
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 correctne…

Hi Joran,

I have followed TigerBeetle with interest for a while, and thank you for your inspirational work and informative presentations.

However, you have stated in several occasions that the lack of memory safety in Zig is not a concern since you don't dynamically allocate memory post startup. However, one of the defects uncovered here (#2435) was caused by dereferencing an uninitialized pointer. I find this pretty concerning, so I wonder if there is something that you will be doing differently to eliminate all similar bugs going forward?

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#29
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's a slightly redundant criticism though - it doesn't present itself as anything other than a single purpose database designed for financial transactions.

That's like saying that rice noodles are no good for making risotto. At the core they are both rice...

Re: Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11

#30
I found the line about Tigerbeetle's model assuming entire disk sector errors but not bit/byte errors rather interesting - as someone who has created error correcting codes, this seems out of line with my understanding. The only situation I can see it works is where the disk or driver encodes and decodes the sectors... and (on any disk/driver I would care to store an important transactional database) would be reporting tonnes of (possibly corrected) faults before Tigerbeetle was even aware.

Or possibly my mental model of how physical disks and the driver stack behave these days is outdated.

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