High-Throughput OLTP in Three Simple Steps

TigerBeetle is a transaction-processing database that uses immutable double-entry accounting transfers to model financial and non-financial movement of value, offering a different approach from general-purpose SQL databases. Using a bank workload, it shows how deposits can be represented as two atomically linked transfers between aggregate, branch, teller, and customer accounts, with transfer history recorded automatically. The post argues that performance depends on adapting both the data model and application architecture rather than directly copying connection-pool patterns from SQL systems: a single thread-safe client can use automatic batching to combine operations while awaiting responses, reducing request overhead and improving cache use and parallel execution. Large batches reached roughly 454,000 logical transactions, or 909,000 transfers, per second in the benchmark, compared with about 7,000 transactions per second for a tuned relational database implementation, though the comparison is presented as an approximate indicator. It also recommends TigerBeetle’s monotonic time-based identifiers over random UUIDs, because ordered IDs make idempotency checks faster, and concludes that high throughput results from co-designing applications around linked transfers, batching, and ordered identifiers.

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