OLTP Performance
TigerBeetle delivers. High throughput, predictable low latency, and cost-efficiency at scale through first-principles design and relentless optimization. Move more transactions, faster, on less hardware.
More Transactional
In the past 10 years, transaction volumes surged 100x–1,000x across cloud, energy, and gaming — and up to 10,000x in real-time payments. Mainframe or not, legacy systems are at a breaking point.
Traditional SQL databases hold locks across the network; under Amdahl's Law, even modest contention caps write throughput at ≈100–1,000 TPS — a hard asymptote that no amount of horizontal scaling can overcome.
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Database Design
Hardware has leapt ahead. I/O is faster than ever and CPU is the new bottleneck. The future of transaction processing optimizes for cache locality and looks nothing like the HDD-bound past.
Strict Consistency
TigerBeetle advances debit/credit — the standard for transaction processing — to guarantee correctness by design with a universal schema and strict serializability. Eliminate errors, enforce integrity, and accelerate development.
Forty years ago, Jim Gray — Turing Award-winner and pioneer of SQL, ACID, and OLTP — defined debit/credit as the standard measure of transaction processing.
SQL is a query language for general-purpose (OLGP) or analytical (OLAP) workloads: reading variable-length strings (e.g. users, products). OLTP is complementary: writing fixed-size integers (e.g. orders, payments).
SQL databases shift OLTP invariants — idempotency, isolation, even two-phase commit (2PC) — onto developers, leading to double-spends, negative balances, and costly reconciliation failures.
TigerBeetle achieves what few databases dare: the strongest isolation level in theory — rare in practice. Transactions execute atomically, in real time. No anomalies. No caveats. No clock bets. Only correctness — at scale.
Even the strongest durability doesn't prevent logical data loss. Where SQL allows destructive UPDATE and DELETE, TigerBeetle enforces append-only immutability — ensuring effortless reconciliation and audit success.
TigerBeetle enforces invariants in the DBMS — guaranteeing correctness and accelerating development — with the standard measure of transaction processing: debit/credit.
Debit/credit is minimal and complete: two entities (accounts, transfers) and one invariant (every debit has an equal and opposite credit) model any exchange of value, in any domain.
High Availability
TigerBeetle runs across AWS, GCP, and Azure simultaneously: eliminating lock-in, meeting regulatory requirements, and protecting availability — even through provider slowdowns and disruptions.
TigerBeetle implements MIT’s Viewstamped Replication (VSR) with deterministic view changes, multipath message passing, and no risk of dueling leaders — reducing latency and increasing availability through automated failover for uninterrupted transaction processing.
While most consensus proofs emphasize only process crashes and network partitions, TigerBeetle explicitly models process, network, clock, and storage faults — delivering resilience where it matters most: production.
CAP defines availability physically: “requests to a non-failing node receive a response”. TigerBeetle ensures logical availability: as long as clients can reach a majority, requests complete with strict serializability, preserving safety and liveness under partitions.
The Achilles’ heel of cloud-scale systems is not node or network failure, but gray failure — hardware that slows without crashing. TigerBeetle’s Adaptive Replication Routing (ARR) automatically routes around degraded replicas, reducing latency and sustaining availability.
Traditional systems require rigid majorities for both replication and election. TigerBeetle applies 2016 research: 3/6 replication, 4/6 election — preserving consistency, reducing latency, and increasing availability across zones, regions, and clouds.
Run anywhere — cloud-native or on-premises, bare-metal or virtualized — with a single static binary, zero dependencies, minimal tuning, automated rolling upgrades and pager-free failover.
Durability
TigerBeetle is designed, engineered, and tested to deliver unbreakable durability — even under the most extreme failure scenarios.
Without Durability, the guarantees of Atomicity, Consistency, and Isolation collapse — the only letter in ACID whose loss undoes the others. TigerBeetle rebuilds the DBMS foundation to make durability absolute.
TigerBeetle synchronously commits every operation to a write-ahead log, replicated across a 3/6 quorum. Disks fail, machines crash, datacenters burn — TigerBeetle transactions endure.
TigerBeetle protects every byte with 128-bit checksums stored out of band, detecting and repairing near-byzantine corruption and misdirected I/O, before storage faults can endanger durability.
Traditional databases assume disks fail cleanly. They lose data to fsyncgate, misdirected I/O, or WAL corruption — forcing costly local RAID. TigerBeetle is different: engineered on a strict storage fault model, resilient against corruption, misdirection, even tampering.
TigerBeetle applies 2018 research, using global consensus redundancy to recover from local storage faults — disentangling corruption from power loss and repairing the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) automatically to guarantee correctness and efficiency.
Read: (Best Paper, FAST’18) Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage →
TigerBeetle is the first database to withstand helical fault injection. Jepsen introduced a file corruption nemesis — to flip random bits like cosmic rays — across all machines. Unprecedented resilience, proven under the harshest failures.
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TigerBeetle is built to be tested in a deterministic “flight” simulator — applying model checking techniques on production code to expose the rarest, most dangerous bugs before production.
Fault injectors unleash partitions, packet loss, crashes, skewed clocks, latency shifts, disk corruption, and misdirection. Relentless verifiers push correctness and availability to breaking point.
With time accelerated 700x, a fleet of 1024 dedicated CPU cores simulate TigerBeetle clusters through two millennia of faults and recoveries — every day. This is the power of autonomous testing.
“TigerBeetle exhibits a refreshing dedication to correctness. The architecture appears sound: Viewstamped Replication is a well-established consensus protocol, and TigerBeetle’s integration of Flexible Quorums and Protocol-Aware Recovery seem to have allowed improved availability and extreme resilience to data file corruption.” — Kyle Kingsbury
For enterprises committed to excellence, TigerBeetle's world-class team provides fully managed cross-cloud deployments with automated disaster recovery, and 24/7 responsiveness with proactive monitoring. Comprehensive on-site expertise from senior engineers ensures success at every step. Reserved for select partners.
