Listen "A million transactions per second: building TigerBeetle with Joran Greef"
Episode Synopsis
In this episode, Aaron talks with Joran Greef, CEO and creator of TigerBeetle, the world’s first financial transactions database. Joran takes us on a deep dive of on how TigerBeetle brings double-entry accounting principles directly into the database layer to achieve extreme correctness, performance, and fault tolerance at scale.Follow Joran and TigerBeetle:Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/jorandirkgreefWebsite: https://tigerbeetle.comGitHub: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetleTiger Style: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TIGER_STYLE.mdYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UC3TlyQ3h6lC_jSWust2leGg Follow Aaron:Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis Database School: https://databaseschool.comDatabase School YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UCT3XN4RtcFhmrWl8tf_o49g (Subscribe today)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancisWebsite: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.Chapters:00:00 - Introduction and crossover between accounting and databases01:50 - Meet Joran Greef and the origins of TigerBeetle02:55 - What makes TigerBeetle different from general purpose databases04:38 - The founding story and the 5,000-year history of transactions07:42 - How modern commerce became highly transactional10:06 - Recognizing the limits of general purpose databases13:18 - From distributed systems to payment infrastructure17:01 - Discovering bottlenecks in traditional database performance19:58 - Why traditional databases can’t scale for microtransactions23:05 - Introducing double-entry accounting concepts25:20 - How double-entry accounting mirrors database design31:35 - Modeling ledgers and event sourcing in Tiger Beetle35:02 - Why TigerBeetle outperforms Postgres and MySQL40:05 - Batching transactions for massive throughput47:09 - Client-side batching and zero-copy efficiency50:04 - Handling contention and concurrency internally56:03 - Ensuring correctness and atomicity in transactions57:17 - Designing for mission-critical systems and reliability1:00:50 - Building safety through deterministic simulation testing1:04:55 - Detecting and recovering from storage faults1:10:00 - How TigerBeetle prevents data corruption1:17:01 - Distributed replication and self-healing data1:20:08 - Who’s using TigerBeetle and how it’s structured as a company1:24:01 - How to learn more and get involved with TigerBeetle1:26:15 - Closing thoughts and where to find Joran online
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