July in TigerLand
Dear friends,
We hope your July was joyful. Last month, we added assertions to improve defense in depth, lectured on performance engineering at TU Munich, and explained write-ahead log durability live on IronBeetle. TigerBeetle powers 40% of Egypt’s stock exchange! And we had a blast in Boston at the 4th edition of Systems Distributed, with talks coming soon to YouTube.
Let’s go!
“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
— Sherlock Holmes
- We noticed an unintended stack copy in our radix sort algorithm when processing large 8 KiB chunks! By inspecting the LLVM IR generated by the Zig compiler—the intermediate representation of the program before it is translated into machine code—we could spot the issue. And added a benchmark to properly measure the results post fix.
- To improve our defense in depth against accidental schema changes, we added several extra assertions to ensure that the data read from storage matches the LSM Forest definition.
- We added a note about data privacy to our Concepts documentation, explaining how applications can design referential data stored in OLGP (online general-purpose) databases to comply with GDPR and other regulations while keeping immutable records in TigerBeetle safely anonymous.
- The
tigerbeetle inspect constantsCLI command has been improved to display constants related to the maximum number of tables per LSM Tree and LSM Forest, and the checkpoint schedule.
- @NiclasvanEyk spotted and fixed a typo in the CDC CLI example. Thanks, Niclas!
Durability! The aspect of ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) that undoes all of the others. Last month on IronBeetle, matklad explained how we maximize durability, covering how the WAL (write-ahead log) is made durable, allowing TigerBeetle to detect, recover, and even repair from data corruption!
Join us live every Thursday at 5pm UTC on Twitch, YouTube, and X!
Job Queues are Deceptively Tricky! Jul 14
An excellent post about “job
queues”—systems where there is some notion of submitting batch jobs,
scheduling them, and running them—by Varun Gandhi.
How Roc’s Rust-to-Zig Rewrite is Going, Jul 15
For the past year and a half, the team building Roc’s compiler has been
rewriting their 300,000 lines of Rust code into Zig. Richard Feldman wrote about how it’s going,
including why
Zig and things
missed from Rust.
40% of the Egyptian Stock Exchange… Jul 17
Thndr is the #1 investing app in Egypt,
with a bold vision to transform and modernize investing in the MENA
region; powering
40% of the Egyptian Exchange, in turn powered by TigerBeetle. A joy
to partner, and a solid step towards our vision to power the world’s
transactions.
TUM Guest Lecture, Performance Engineering at TigerBeetle,
Jul 24
Understanding OLTP workloads, algorithm engineering, and building an S3
client with 20x more throughput (and with a single core)—just a slice of
the topics covered in Maxi Kuschewski’s performance
engineering guest lecture last month at TU Munich, for Prof. Jana
Giceva’s Data Processing on Modern Hardware course. Sehr gut, Maxi!
Three Out of Three for Jonas in Atlanta! Jul
25-26
What a thrill it was to be at Michelin Raceway last month, watching
Jonas Axboe finish pole x 3! Heavy
downpours and lightning temporarily suspended Friday’s racing, Joran
and Jens pored
over sensor data until the storm
blew over, and Jonas won races 1, 2,
and 3
including a nail-biting overtake! Tough conditions, tough driver!
TigerBeetle Core System Architecture: Deconstructing
Performance Engineering and the Power of Custom Interfaces, Jul
28
An excellent, in-depth
technical analysis of TigerBeetle’s core architecture by Md Shuvo,
exploring how static memory allocation, zero-copy io_uring interfaces,
and Zig-based performance engineering eliminate runtime overhead and
deliver predictable, sub-millisecond tail latencies. Thanks for this,
Shuvo!
Systems Distributed ‘26, Jul 27-28
Twelve talks over two days, sunlit lunches with a waterside view, a duck
quacking at more than one of our lightning speakers… and the fourth
edition of Systems Distributed was over before we could whisper ‘ginger
shot’. Whichever the city, there are few places we’d rather be than
gathered with the SD community. To all who contributed this year,
whether a talk prepared, time invested to travel and attend, or paying
it forward with a #systemsdistributed
shout out—thank you!
Systems Distributed ‘26 Online, from Aug 19
Every year, we release Systems
Distributed
talks
on YouTube so as
many people as possible the world over can enjoy them. Once again, the
lineup was remarkable! From Gerard Holzmann on The Power of 10, Heidi
Howard on 10 Years of Flexible Paxos and James Cowling on the software
the future deserves to Jens Axboe’s ‘making of io_uring’, Andrew
Kelley’s State of the Tagged Union, and Ram Alagappan’s readying shared
logs for the agentic era (plus the latest TigerTalk from Joran)… and
more! Premieres will flight twice per week from August 19, Mondays and
Wednesdays at 5pm UTC / 9am PT, and speakers will join the chat to
answer your questions live. The schedule is now available, so mark your
calendars (or follow
@TigerBeetle for reminders) and get set for SD26 online!
’Till next time… Boston, whoa!
The TigerBeetle Team
