TigerBeetle: What Actually Happens When You Need a Database That Can't Lose Money

You use PostgreSQL. You use MySQL. You've probably heard of Redis, Cassandra, maybe even CockroachDB. But there's a database that financial infrastructure companies quietly rely on for the hot path of money movement—and almost no application developers know it exists.

TigerBeetle.

It's not a general-purpose database. It doesn't do JOINs. It doesn't have a query planner. It doesn't support arbitrary schemas. What it does is one thing: financial transactions at a million transfers per second on a single core, with durability guarantees that survive disk corruption, network partitions, and power loss.

Here's what actually happens under the hood.

The Problem: OLTP Isn't OLGP

Most developers think of databases as "places to store data." But there's a fundamental split:

OLGP (Online General Purpose) — PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite. Flexible schemas, ad-hoc queries, ACID transactions, indexes for everything.…