Why TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world

1

TigerBeetle

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, like locking rows rather than using condition checks at commit time, because "that's how OLTP was intended to be used when it was designed ~50(?) years ago". In their cited https://tigerbeetle.com/#performance the lowest the slider can go is 1% contention. Do you think Stripe has 1% contention directly on an OLTP DB? Definitely not. You can build systems that _expect contention_, and elegantly handle it at REALLY high throughput. These systems protect the DB from contention, so you can continue to scale. From talking to folks working on these systems, I roughly know the kinds of transactional (financial) throughput of DBs like Stripe's and other systems - they have _many_ more zeros behind them than their performance comparison page proposes they could possibly have at even 0.01% contention. Their marketing largely ignores this fact, and treats everyone like they just slam the DB with junior engineer-designed interactive transactions. Most developers (I hope) are smarter than that if they're working at a payments company. There's even the title "payments engineer" for the kind of person that's thinks about scaling contention and correctness all day. TigerBeetle is great, but I find the pattern of being quite misleading about other OLTPs off putting.

#Finance #Databases #Accounting 11 social mentions

2

GitHub

> AFAIK - the only reason FDB isn't massively popular is because no one has bothered to write good layers on top. I do know of a few folks writing a SQS, DynamoDB and SQLite layers. I started writing this comment: > It seems interesting, but considering what it's for, why aren't the hyperscalers using it? And while writing it I started searching for FoundationDB and found this: > https://github.com/<<apple>>/foundationdb Ah, all right :-p.

#Software Development #Code Collaboration #Git 2319 social mentions

3

turbopuffer

> My other mild criticism is in the discussion on TigerBeetle’s consensus: yes, it seems quite clever and has no other dependencies, but it’s also not trying to deal with large rows. When you can fit 8,190 transactions into a 1 MiB packet that takes a single trip to be delivered, you can probably manage what would be impossible for a traditional RDBMS. Isn't that the point? They're saying to separate out transactions workload from other workloads. They're not saying they'll replace your OLGP db, you remove transactionally important data into another db. It's something similar that we see with another db: https://turbopuffer.com/.

#Databases #Vector Databases #Object Storage 5 social mentions