Modern businesses need to process vast amounts of transactions quickly and accurately. Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems are designed to handle large numbers of simple, quick transactions such as online banking, order entry, and retail sales. However, traditional OLTP systems often face write contention, which occurs when multiple transactions attempt to modify the same data concurrently. This contention can lead to delays and reduced performance, creating significant challenges for the banking, trading, and inventory management industries.
Existing solutions, such as general-purpose databases, attempt to handle OLTP workloads but often fall short. They can struggle with the high demands of rapid transaction processing and may require expensive hardware and complex configurations to maintain acceptable performance levels.
Meet TigerBeetle: a new solution designed to tackle these specific challenges. It rethinks the design of distributed databases, focusing on the needs of OLTP workloads. By redesigning the storage engine and consensus protocol, TigerBeetle minimizes write contention and maximizes performance. It also has a built-in schema for debit and credit transactions, making it particularly useful for financial applications.
TigerBeetle offers a host of powerful features:
- High OLTP Performance: Processes transactions up to 1000 times faster than general-purpose databases.
- Financial Schema: Ships with a built-in debit/credit schema.
- Strict Serializability: Ensures financial consistency without relying on clock synchronization.
- Fault-Tolerance: Uses global redundancy to survive local storage faults and provides automated failover with the VSR consensus protocol.
- Scalability and Cost-Efficiency: Handles over 100 billion transactions per cluster at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.
- Deterministic Testing: Uses a deterministic simulator for fault injection, simulating network partitions, packet loss, crashes, and disk corruption.
- Double-Entry Accounting: Supports T-accounts for double-entry accounting.
- Linked Events: Allows multiple transfers between accounts to succeed or fail as a single unit.
- Net Balance Limits: Enforces limits where debits may not exceed credits and vice versa.
- Chart of Accounts: Facilitates querying accounts or transfers by their type.
- Connected Systems: Maintains connections to third-party entities with a 128-bit user data identifier.
- Multi-Tenant Currencies: Supports accounts in different currencies with transfers only between accounts of the same unit.
- Two-Phase Transfers: Manages reserved debits and credits with accept or reject phases.
- Inflight Balances: Differentiates between reserved and committed amounts for better control over liquidity.
In conclusion, TigerBeetle offers a robust and efficient solution for businesses needing to handle large-scale transaction processing. Its specialized design, high-speed performance, and cost-effectiveness make it an attractive option for various industries, from core banking to gaming live operations.
Niharika is a Technical consulting intern at Marktechpost. She is a third year undergraduate, currently pursuing her B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Kharagpur. She is a highly enthusiastic individual with a keen interest in Machine learning, Data science and AI and an avid reader of the latest developments in these fields.
