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The 1000x faster financial database (Changelog Interviews #635)
1 hour 40 minutes Posted Apr 2, 2025 at 10:45 pm.
Welcome to The Changelog
Sponsor: Augment Code
Start the show!
Stumbling into it
Maybe I did it wrong
It's the row locks
Pareto meets the Mag 7
Financial, not SQL, transactions
A specialized database
Why build yet another database?
Sponsor: Depot
Where do you start?
Who is 'we'?
10_000x faster?!
New world, new constraints
Row, column, mulit-major
Multi-row major implications
Embarrassingly simple
On durability
Centuries of testing
What about real-world use tho
Worst-case scenario logic
Sponsor: Notion
TigerBeetle Simulator
The open source story
Jerod reacts
What about AWS re-hosting
Written in Zig
Redis open source again?
Wrapping up
Closing thoughts
0:00
1:40:28
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Show notes

In July of 2020, Joran Dirk Greef stumbled into a fundamental limitation in the general-purpose database design for transaction processing. This sent him on a path that ended with TigerBeetle, a redesigned distributed database for financial transactions that yielded three orders of magnitude faster OLTP performance over the usual (general-purpose) suspects.

On this episode, Joran joins Jerod to explain how TigerBeetle got so fast, to defend its resilience and durability claims as a new market entrant, and to stake his claim at the intersection of open source and business. Oh, plus the age old question: Why Zig?

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Show Notes:

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