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TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

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Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#131

While I am a fan of TigerBeetle’s general stance on correctness, coding practices, and their desire to hyper-specialize, I have some critiques on the post. I think the paragraph about multi-node is a bit misleading. Contrary to what cloud native folk will tell you, a single beefy DB, well-tuned and with a connection pooler, can serve a dizzying amount of QPS just fine. At a former employer, during a maintenance perio…

That a traditional modern RDBMS is very fast is not really useful here because the use case of Tigerbeetle includes work loads with high contention. Under that kind of load, in their own tests you can see in a recent conference talk, you can see the throughput drops dramatically in clusters where many transactions affect a single account.

edit: from the horses mouth is better https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437046

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#132

Why hasn't anyone mentioned the game they made? It looks fantastic. The concept of letting players try to crash a system to demonstrate its robustness is brilliant.

Thanks!

For anyone who wants to play the walking sim (excuse the pun!): https://sim.tigerbeetle.com

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#133
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would DNS look like if it were released in 2025?

Owned by GoogleFlare with public spec, but most of it would be run as closed source application that uses extended spec akin to EEE - making it impossible to use without relying on GoogleFlare. config defined in YAML.

>config defined in YAML.

when I woke up today, I didn't really expect to be convinced that we live in a relatively good timeline, but...

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#135

I’m somewhat confused by the distributed story for tiger beetle. In the docs here: https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/concepts/performance/#single-th... It says: “TigerBeetle uses a single core by design and uses a single leader node to process events. Adding more nodes can therefore increase reliability, but not throughput.” How does this work with multi-region? Does this mean that regardless of where in the world your us…

The way I understand it yes. Latency will be dictated by going to the leader node and replication to enough followers. The CAP theorem dictates that if you want strong consistency the way they offer you have to talk to a quorum of nodes IIRC N/2 + 1. Paxos and Raft also work that way.

Apparently there is a game about it https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023-07-11-we-put-a-distributed...

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#136
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throwing out SQL is not really the recipe for "performance" We've discovered hacks to work around the limitations of SQL, so you can maintain performance with sufficient hackiness, but you have to give up "purity" to get there. Worse is better applies, I suppose, but if we were starting over today the design would be very different. Throwing out SQL isn't strictly required, but like Rust isn't strictly required whe…

No, I'm arguing in fact the opposite and you'll have to prove the point wrong instead of drive-by insisting on this. The point of Codd's original paper was to separate concerns about data storage from its representation and to propose an elegant representational & transformation & query model based on first order logic and I believe he succeeded. SQL was the first serious attempt to translate this into a working syst…

The opposite of what? There is no contention with Codd's original paper. I'd suggest that Codd's Alpha paper was lacking in the same way SQL struggles, but that's a bit orthogonal to what you seem to be trying to say. I know its a bit confusing as SQL tries to name many different, independent things with the same name, but when confused it is best to become unconfused, not go off to la-la land.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#137
I've been applying a lot of principles and suggestions from TigerBeetle style lately, mainly in Rust and Go and I can’t recommend it enough.

- single entry point, near-zero deps

- ci locally and tested, one command to runs tests, coverage, lint etc

- property/snapshot/swarm testing, I love writing simulations now and letting the assertions crash

- fast/slow split + everything is deterministic with a seed

- explicit upper bounds + pool of resources. I still dynamically allocate but it makes code simpler to reason about

Thanks to the TB team for the videos and docs they been putting out lately.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#138
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS still runs strong and it was ~~designed~~ released* in the November 1983. It still holds up basically whole of internet. in most cases SQL is good enough for 90% of workloads.

Isn't DNS a catastrophic clusterfuck which also had to be patched up multiple times to not allow people burning down the whole world? I mean, yes, it's doing its job, but mainly because of people doing their job.

People who are malicious or see an opportunity for gain will always abuse a system. Just because the DNS system has had to be patched to handle the abuse doesn't mean its badly designed. If it were as badly designed as your comment seems to imply it wouldn't be able to operate even half as well as it does.

The combustion engine's fundamental design is pretty damn good and that it had to be updated to handle unleaded gasoline isn't a knock (pun... intended?) against that design.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#139
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm arguing in fact the opposite and you'll have to prove the point wrong instead of drive-by insisting on this. The point of Codd's original paper was to separate concerns about data storage from its representation and to propose an elegant representational & transformation & query model based on first order logic and I believe he succeeded. SQL was the first serious attempt to translate this into a working syst…

The opposite of what? There is no contention with Codd's original paper. I'd suggest that Codd's Alpha paper was lacking in the same way SQL struggles, but that's a bit orthogonal to what you seem to be trying to say. I know its a bit confusing as SQL tries to name many different, independent things with the same name, but when confused it is best to become unconfused, not go off to la-la land.

Notably, you edited your comment after my reply :-)

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#140
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of what? There is no contention with Codd's original paper. I'd suggest that Codd's Alpha paper was lacking in the same way SQL struggles, but that's a bit orthogonal to what you seem to be trying to say. I know its a bit confusing as SQL tries to name many different, independent things with the same name, but when confused it is best to become unconfused, not go off to la-la land.

Notably, you edited your comment after my reply :-)

Strangly off-topic, but if that's where you want to go, what's notable about that? Given the confusion, there should have been no rush to reply before some minor adjustments were made. That is how you ended up here in the first place. Understand first, the consider replying.
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