TigerBeetle
lastmod 2025-10-02created 2024-12-115 edits
An OLTP database specialized for accounting
One of 7 databases for 2025
- See Database#7 databases for 2025 (GeekNews)
- TigerBeetle is a single-purpose database specialized for financial transactions
- Unlike general-purpose databases, it focuses on a specific purpose, particularly financial transactions
- Provided as open source, designed with high reliability and correctness as its goals
- Implements NASA's Power of Ten Rules and Protocol-Aware Recovery
- Uses strict serialisability and Direct I/O to avoid problems related to the kernel page cache
- Its thoroughness can be seen in the Safety doc and its distinctive programming style, "Tiger Style"
- Zig is a relatively new systems programming language, but it is an ideal fit for TigerBeetle's goals
- Leverages Zig's strengths to maximize simplicity and performance
- Experiment with modeling financial accounts in a local deployment:
- Install and use it by following the Quick Start
- Explore the possibility of combining it with general-purpose databases by referring to the System Architecture docs
- e.g. integrate it with PostgreSQL or FoundationDB to expand use cases
See also
Favorite site
Articles
- TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world | GeekNews
- Why TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world | Amplify Partners
- The financial transactions database TigerBeetle is a new database with native support for debits and credits; whereas existing SQL databases needed 10 to 20 queries per transaction, it processes 8,190 transactions in a single round trip
- While many systems opt for fast coding and expanding dependencies, this project sticks to counterintuitive strategies such as writing code slowly, deterministic simulation testing (DST), and zero dependencies
- Differentiating itself from existing OLTP databases that rely on a single-node architecture, it builds distributed-by-default operation, clock fault tolerance (cluster time), and storage fault tolerance into its design, and gains implementation simplicity and visibility by choosing Viewstamped Replication and Zig
- Applies the TigerStyle methodology, inspired by NASA's Power of Ten, adhering to strict coding standards such as using an average of 2 or more assertions per function, enforcing static memory allocation, and keeping assertions enabled even in production
- With a structure suited to the era of hyper-transactionality, such as real-time payments, gaming, and energy billing, it sets a performance and correctness benchmark for next-generation OLTP and is emerging as a next-generation transaction processing system to replace SQL databases that are 20 to 30 years old