Changelog Interviews – Episode #635
The 1000x faster financial database
with Joran Dirk Greef, creator of TigerBeetle
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?
Featuring
Sponsors
Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.
Depot – Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
Notes & Links
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | Welcome to The Changelog | 01:25 |
| 2 | 01:25 | Sponsor: Augment Code | 03:09 |
| 3 | 04:33 | Start the show! | 00:44 |
| 4 | 05:18 | Stumbling into it | 03:10 |
| 5 | 08:27 | Maybe I did it wrong | 01:13 |
| 6 | 09:41 | It's the row locks | 01:53 |
| 7 | 11:33 | Pareto meets the Mag 7 | 02:07 |
| 8 | 13:40 | Financial, not SQL, transactions | 01:11 |
| 9 | 14:51 | A specialized database | 03:10 |
| 10 | 18:01 | Why build yet another database? | 04:55 |
| 11 | 22:56 | Sponsor: Depot | 02:20 |
| 12 | 25:16 | Where do you start? | 02:30 |
| 13 | 27:46 | Who is 'we'? | 01:24 |
| 14 | 29:09 | 10_000x faster?! | 01:35 |
| 15 | 30:44 | New world, new constraints | 01:30 |
| 16 | 32:14 | Row, column, mulit-major | 03:54 |
| 17 | 36:08 | Multi-row major implications | 05:37 |
| 18 | 41:45 | Embarrassingly simple | 02:52 |
| 19 | 44:36 | On durability | 10:28 |
| 20 | 55:05 | Centuries of testing | 02:12 |
| 21 | 57:17 | What about real-world use tho | 05:21 |
| 22 | 1:02:38 | Worst-case scenario logic | 01:17 |
| 23 | 1:03:55 | Sponsor: Notion | 03:08 |
| 24 | 1:07:03 | TigerBeetle Simulator | 08:35 |
| 25 | 1:15:38 | The open source story | 10:18 |
| 26 | 1:25:56 | Jerod reacts | 00:22 |
| 27 | 1:26:18 | What about AWS re-hosting | 04:39 |
| 28 | 1:30:57 | Written in Zig | 05:31 |
| 29 | 1:36:28 | Redis open source again? | 00:59 |
| 30 | 1:37:28 | Wrapping up | 00:43 |
| 31 | 1:38:10 | Closing thoughts | 02:16 |