The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

The 1000x faster financial database (Interview)

Apr 2, 2025

Joran Dirk Greef, the creator of TigerBeetle, shares his journey in developing a revolutionary financial database that boasts transaction speeds 1000 times faster than traditional systems. He discusses the challenges of general-purpose databases and how innovations in query design and concurrency control have redefined performance. Joran also highlights the importance of deterministic testing for reliability and the role of open source in the space, all while playfully engaging with the concept of using the Zig programming language for development.

01:40:28

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Episode guests

Joran Dirk Greef

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

The creation of Tiger Beetle highlights a shift from conventional database limitations to a specialized design that drastically improves performance for financial transactions.

Through innovative concurrency control and optimized memory management, Tiger Beetle processes thousands of transactions in a single call, enhancing overall efficiency.

The decision to use the Zig programming language for Tiger Beetle underscores the importance of performance and safety in low-level system programming for database design.

Deep dives

Discovery of Database Limitations

A key insight in the discussion revolves around a fundamental limitation encountered in conventional databases designed for transaction processing. The speaker, Euron Dirk Grief, explored various strategies to enhance performance but found that the standard approaches, such as increasing memory and storage speed, failed to yield improvements. This led to the realization that row locks imposed by SQL transactions across network latency severely limited throughput, capping the number of transactions per second achievable by typical databases like MySQL. Recognizing this constraint laid the groundwork for the creation of Tiger Beetle, a specialized database tailored for processing financial transactions efficiently.

Intro

5min

Revolutionizing Financial Database Design

13min

Boosting Fintech Through Efficient Databases and Build Acceleration

7min

Revolutionizing Database Performance

27min

Accelerating Testing in Distributed Systems

3min

Deterministic Simulation Testing in Software Development

8min

Navigating Probability and Embracing Organizational Tools

4min

Exploring Sim Tiger Beetle and Open Source Dynamics

24min

Exploring Zig for Tiger Beetle Development

7min

10.

Exploring Perspectives in Open Source Solutions

3min

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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Featuring:

Joran Dirk Greef – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

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