TigerBeetle is a financial accounting database designed for mission critical safety and performance to power the future of financial services.

Take part in TigerBeetle's $20k consensus challenge: Viewstamped Replication Made Famous

Watch an introduction to TigerBeetle on Zig SHOWTIME for our design decisions regarding performance, safety, and financial accounting primitives:

Read more about the history of TigerBeetle, the problem of balance tracking at scale, and the solution of a purpose-built financial accounting database.

TigerBeetle is not yet production-ready. The production version of TigerBeetle is now under active development. Our DESIGN doc provides an overview of TigerBeetle's data structures and our project board provides a glimpse of where we want to go.

TigerBeetle is easy to run with or without Docker, depending on your preference.

First provision TigerBeetle's data directory.

$ docker run -v $(pwd)/data:/data ghcr.io/coilhq/tigerbeetle \
    format --cluster=0 --replica=0 /data/0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): creating "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(io): allocating 660.140625MiB...

Then run the server.

$ docker run -p 3000:3000 -v $(pwd)/data:/data ghcr.io/coilhq/tigerbeetle \
    start --addresses=0.0.0.0:3000 /data/0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): opening "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(main): 0: cluster=0: listening on 0.0.0.0:3000

To build from source, clone the repo and run the install script.

$ git clone https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle.git
$ cd tigerbeetle
$ scripts/install.sh

Don't worry, this will only make changes within the tigerbeetle directory. No global changes.

Then create the TigerBeetle data file.

$ ./tigerbeetle format --cluster=0 --replica=0 0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): creating "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(io): allocating 660.140625MiB...

And start the server.

$ ./tigerbeetle start --addresses=3000 0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): opening "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(main): 0: cluster=0: listening on 127.0.0.1:3000

Now that you've got the server running with or without Docker, let's connect to the running server and do some accounting!

First install the Node client.

$ npm install -g tigerbeetle-node

Then create a client connection.

$ node
Welcome to Node.js v16.14.0.
Type ".help" for more information.
> let { createClient } = require('tigerbeetle-node');
> let client = createClient({ cluster_id: 0, replica_addresses: ['3000'] });
info(message_bus): connected to replica 0

Now create two accounts. (Don't worry about the details, you can read about them later.)

> let errors = await client.createAccounts([
  {
    id: 1n,
    ledger: 1,
    code: 718,
    user_data: 0n,
    reserved: Buffer.alloc(48, 0),
    flags: 0,
    debits_pending: 0n,
    debits_posted: 0n,
    credits_pending: 0n,
    credits_posted: 0n,
    timestamp: 0n,
  },
  {
    id: 2n,
    ledger: 1,
    code: 718,
    user_data: 0n,
    reserved: Buffer.alloc(48, 0),
    flags: 0,
    debits_pending: 0n,
    debits_posted: 0n,
    credits_pending: 0n,
    credits_posted: 0n,
    timestamp: 0n,
  },
]);
> errors
[]

Now create a transfer of 10 (of some amount/currency) between the two accounts.

> errors = await client.createTransfers([
  {
    id: 1n,
    debit_account_id: 1n,
    credit_account_id: 2n,
    pending_id: 0n,
    user_data: 0n,
    reserved: 0n,
    timeout: 0n,
    ledger: 1,
    code: 718,
    flags: 0,
    amount: 10n,
    timestamp: 0n,
  }
]);

Now, the amount of 10 has been credited to account 2 and debited from account 1. Let's query TigerBeetle for these two accounts to verify!

> let accounts = await client.lookupAccounts([1n, 2n]);
> console.log(accounts.map(a => ({
    id: a.id,
	debits_posted: a.debits_posted,
	credits_posted: a.credits_posted,
	timestamp: a.timestamp,
  })));
[
  {
    id: 1n,
    debits_posted: 10n,
    credits_posted: 0n,
    timestamp: 1662489240014463675n
  },
  {
    id: 2n,
    debits_posted: 0n,
    credits_posted: 10n,
    timestamp: 1662489240014463676n
  }
]

And indeed you can see that account 1 has debits_posted as 10 and account 2 has credits_posted as 10. The 10 amount is fully accounted for!

For further reading:

• Running a 3-node cluster locally with docker-compose

• For Node.js: tigerbeetle-node
• For Golang: tigerbeetle-go

Join the TigerBeetle community in Discord.

First grab the sources and run the setup script:

$ git clone https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle.git
$ cd tigerbeetle
$ scripts/install.sh

With TigerBeetle installed, you are ready to benchmark!

$ scripts/benchmark.sh

If you encounter any benchmark errors, please send us the resulting benchmark.log.

Read docs/HACKING.md.

Along the way, we also put together a series of performance demos and sketches to get you comfortable building TigerBeetle, show how low-level code can sometimes be easier than high-level code, help you understand some of the key components within TigerBeetle, and enable back-of-the-envelope calculations to motivate design decisions.

You may be interested in:

• demos/protobeetle, how batching changes everything.
• demos/bitcast, how Zig makes zero-overhead network deserialization easy, fast and safe.
• demos/io_uring, how ring buffers can eliminate kernel syscalls, reduce server hardware requirements by a factor of two, and change the way we think about event loops.
• demos/hash_table, how linear probing compares with cuckoo probing, and what we look for in a hash table that needs to scale to millions (and billions) of account transfers.

Copyright 2020-2022 Coil Technologies, Inc

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use these files except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.