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TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

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Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#21

All of these apply to FoundationDB as well. - Slow code writing. - DST - No dependencies - Distributed by default in prod - Clock fault tolerance with optimistic locking - Jepsen claimed that FDB has more rigorous testing than they could do. - New programming language, Flow, for testing. You probably could solve the same problems with FDB, but TigerBeetle I imagine is more optimized for its use case (I would hope...)…

I am currently working on a post about DST with their team too haha!

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#24

Pretty much agree, I honestly think that TB team should invest some more effort on evangelizing the double-entry model for non-financial scenarios, like managing stocks, booking a show ticket etc. The 1000x API improvement has been done, now people must know how to use it

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 engine would just get hammered by the contention, and would struggle to approach TB’s replicated performance, even if PG were single node.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#25

Pretty much agree, I honestly think that TB team should invest some more effort on evangelizing the double-entry model for non-financial scenarios, like managing stocks, booking a show ticket etc. The 1000x API improvement has been done, now people must know how to use it

You could probably do something similar in Postgres.

Similar, yes. But not near the same performance, TB is entirely built around this concept so they became pretty good at it. It's like comparing a lambo and a beetle (no pun intended).

But honestly, if double-entry really become a thing I foresee traditional DBMS agglutinating it just like they did with vector and object databases, getting the long tail of the market.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#26

Pretty much agree, I honestly think that TB team should invest some more effort on evangelizing the double-entry model for non-financial scenarios, like managing stocks, booking a show ticket etc. The 1000x API improvement has been done, now people must know how to use it

You could probably do something similar in Postgres.

It would be nice. I can think of things for which I want to process a financial transaction and something else in one atomic transaction (e.g. selling a ticket - something I am working on right now) and have both content (e.g. product descriptions) and finance in a single store.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#27

> 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.

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.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#28

> 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.

True. The older databases run very well even on hardware which was far less powerful than what is available now.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#29

hope you all like this post as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Just to be a little pedantic for a second, isn't TigerBeetle a database management system (DBMS) whereas a TigerBeetle database would be actual data and metadata managed by TigerBeetle?

> Often the term "database" is also used loosely to refer to any of the DBMS, the database system or an application associated with the database.

Re: TigerBeetle is a most interesting database

#30
I really liked this article. I met the new kid on the block, the DBMS neighborhood. I also didn't know that Zig programming language existed. So many new things. Congratulations to TigerBeetle! I'm going to tell my team about it and try it out on an interesting project.
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