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TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

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Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#91

Post by eitland »

pjmlp wrote: post #50
dakiol wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If we are talking about distributed systems in which we have N different databases, then distributed transactions are left as an exercise to the reader (that’s why we have things like Sagas). Within a single machine, yeah, relational dbs still work like a charm.

I was part of a project that successfully deployed them into production using Oracle, sometimes those license costs are actually worth it.

Agree.

But for anyone tempted by Oracle, do remember that the upfront, agreed licence costs are only a fraction of the true price:

You’ll need someone who actually knows Oracle - either already in place or willing to invest a serious amount of time learning it. Without that, you’re almost certainly better off choosing a simpler database that people are comfortable with.

There’s always a non-zero risk of an Oracle rep trying to “upsell” you. And by upsell, I mean threatening legal action unless you cough up for additional bits a new salesperson has suddenly decided you’re using. (A company I worked with sold Oracle licences and had a long, happy relationship with them - until one day they went after us over some development databases. Someone higher up at Oracle smoothed it over, but the whole experience was unnerving enough.)

Incidental and accidental complexity: I’ve worked with Windows from 3.1 through to Server 2008, with Linux from early Red Hat in 2001 through to the latest production distros, plus a fair share of weird and wonderful applications, everything from 1980s/90s radar acquisition running on 2010 operating systems through a wide range of in house, commercial and open source software and up to modern microservices — and none of it comes close to Oracle’s level of pain.

Edit: Installating Delphi 6 with 14 packages came close, I used 3 days when I had to find every package scattered on disks in shelves and drawers and across ancient web paces + posted as abandonware on source forge but I guess I could learn to do that in a day if I had to do it twice a month. Oracle consistently took me 3 days - if I did everything correct on first try and didn't have to start from scratch.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#92

Post by cma256 »

tux3 wrote: post #67
cma256 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a financial database built for use cases where this invariant holds and built for enabling new use cases where this invariant prevented businesses from expanding into new industries. The creator says as much: > Without much sweat for general purpose workloads.

Having a niche and expanding into new industries are all fine, there is no problem with having a DB filling a particular sub-segment of the market. But writing that traditional SQL databases cannot go above these "100-1000 TPS" numbers due to Amdahl's law is going to raise some eyebrows.

> But writing that traditional SQL databases cannot go above these "100-1000 TPS" numbers due to Amdahl's law is going to raise some eyebrows.

I don't think that's controversial. Amdahl's law applies to all software. Its not a peculiar feature of SQL databases. The comment is well-contextualized, in my view, but reasonable minds may disagree.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#93

Post by sgarland »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #85

I really like the work Joran and his team have done around DST, distributed systems awareness, and performance practices. I especially love the craziness around no dependencies (well, could you consider an underlying OS a dependecy?). But I've always felt the way they treat normal OLTP (they call OLGP) seems unfair. For example, comparisons using clear sub-optimal interactive SQL transactions for financial workloads,…

> Do you think Stripe has 1% contention directly on an OLTP DB? Definitely not.

Stripe runs on top of MongoDB, which is horrifying in its own right, but in any case comparing them to a shop running an RDBMS is apples to oranges.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#94

Post by deadbabe »

jorangreef wrote: post #24
deadbabe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could probably do something similar in Postgres.

You could, but TB brings a whole lot of debit/credit primitives out of the box (making it dead simple for e.g. 2PC money movement across third party systems, or transactions of thousands of transactions, to express complex financial contracts)… that are Jepsen-tested, which run multi-AZ, and which would probably take months if not years to replicate on PG. Even then, the internal concurrency control of PG’s storage e…

Nothing takes “months or years” anymore, if you really wanted this it could be done fairly quick by someone who knows what they’re doing and you don’t layer it in bureaucracy.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#95

Post by fjfaase »

I wonder if the 'debits and credits' example is still realistic. Is it not that banks record all individual money transfers and keep them on record for years (often due to national laws that require this). Then the balance on a certain account is a simply a selection/view on the set of all transactions. For efficiency reasons you may want to store the result in some table. If there is a limit on withdrawals on a certain account, you do need to calculate the balance first and then a transaction mechanism is needed to assure that there are not several money transfer that individually do not surpass the limit but together do.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#97

Post by sgarland »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #89
justinclift wrote: post #13

> In less than a decade, the world has become at least three orders of magnitude more transactional. And yet the SQL databases we still use to power this are 20-30 years old. Can they hold up? Errr yes. Without much sweat really. Just because something started ~30 years ago doesn't mean it hasn't updated with the times, and doesn't mean it was built on bad foundations.

Are you telling me that new shiny things are not always better that established, time tested and boring tech? Sometimes I feel like we software engineers have the worst memory of any engineers.

I don’t even think it’s memory, it’s lack of experience. A lot of the battle-tested infrastructure is now abstracted away to the point that a lot of devs are hard-pressed to explain the difference between AWS’ ALB and NLB, much less name OSS versions of them.

Actually, load balancers are a great example. The number of times I’ve seen a team re-implementing HAProxy, but poorly, is entirely too high. The reasoning is always something along the lines of “we need this extremely specific feature.” OK, and have you even read the manual for HAProxy? Or if that feature truly doesn’t exist, did you consider implementing that separately?

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#98

Post by pjmlp »

justinclift wrote: post #70
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you want Design By Contract, dependent types, or formal verification. However, several factors have to be taken into account regarding performance impact when they get cleverly written, thus in manys cases they can only be fully turned on during debug builds.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at Cue before? It seems to be used for stuff like this, though I'm yet to really look into it properly. https://cuelang.org

No, yet another language to discover, thanks.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#99

Post by wiradikusuma »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #35
wiradikusuma wrote: post #20

We were considering TigerBeetle, but found blockers: * We use Cloudflare Workers. TigerBeetle client app is not supported. It might work using Cloudflare Containers, but then the reason we use Cloudflare is for the Workers. --> https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/issues/3177 * TigerBeetle doesn't support any auth. It means the containing server (e.g. a VPS) must restrict by IP. Problem is, serverless doesn't h…

But Cloudflare Workers or AWS Lambda setup would not work anyway with any db? * spawning 1000 workers all opening a connection to a db, * solved by service/proxy in front of db, * proxy knows how to reach db anyway, let's do private network and not care about auth

Cloudflare has its own DB (D1, Sqlite-derived), but you can also connect with PostgreSQL using their adapter (Hyperdrive). I have used both, they're okay.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#100

Post by motoboi »

ksec wrote: post #83

>Most teams write code fast. TigerBeetle tries to write code slow. Most teams treat testing as a necessary evil. TigerBeetle is built entirely on Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST). Most teams build their software on top of loads of other software. TigerBeetle has zero dependencies. I believe that was more like the norm 25+ years ago. Before Google and Facebook brought in the move fast and break things mentality…

Let's wait 25 years and we'll see if TigerBeetle becomes the next google or if it's engulfed by a less perfect (but faster) rival.
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