[HN Gopher] TigerBeetle raises $6.4M to power the future of fina...
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       TigerBeetle raises $6.4M to power the future of financial
       accounting infra
        
       Author : matdehaast
       Score  : 81 points
       Date   : 2023-01-30 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tigerbeetle.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tigerbeetle.com)
        
       | oofbey wrote:
       | But I thought the future of financial accounting infra was the
       | blockchain. Problem solved, right?
        
         | itsthecourier wrote:
         | Not if you want speed and you have no need to make it
         | government resistant by going full rogue cyberpunk by having
         | millions of copies of your data in a constantly distributed
         | state
         | 
         | Remember kids, novel is not necessarily better
        
         | randomsofr wrote:
         | When i saw the title i thought it was another crypto thing, but
         | this one is a real product.
         | 
         | Congrats to the team!
        
           | throwawaymaths wrote:
           | I mean there's no reason you couldn't use it for crypto as a
           | high speed frontend to tx on the blockchain, some sort of
           | lightning-fast network, one might even say
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | Ha, yeah as others have said here TB is on a different bucket,
         | this is no bullshit.
         | 
         | I've tried it out for a couple toy projects and it had showed
         | great potential.
         | 
         | Congrats to the team!
        
       | eatonphil wrote:
       | Since the title was getting long we couldn't quite fit in that
       | it's also open source, and that it's written in Zig. But it is,
       | and it is. :)
       | 
       | https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle
       | 
       | Also, if there are any Africa-based devs here (but of course,
       | you're welcome to come from wherever you are) we're running a
       | systems programming conference with Derek Collison of NATS, Jamie
       | Brandon of TigerBeetle and HYTRADBOI, Andrew Kelley of Zig, and
       | many other great folks.
       | 
       | Next week, Feb 9th and 10th in Cape Town. Maybe we'll see you
       | there!
       | 
       | https://systemsdistributed.com
        
         | mtlynch wrote:
         | Wow, awesome! Congrats, Phil!
        
         | yaa_minu wrote:
         | Heard about this way too late, but I'll consider attending!
        
         | paulgb wrote:
         | Congrats Phil, and the rest of the TigerBeetle team!
        
       | realworldperson wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | agentultra wrote:
       | Does TigerBeetle have a formal proof of serializability or has it
       | been verified by the Jepsen tests? It's mentioned in the blog
       | post and I'm curious how it fares in that department.
       | 
       | Cool project!
        
         | eatonphil wrote:
         | There's an unofficial Jepsen test for TigerBeetle here:
         | https://github.com/nurturenature/jepsen-tigerbeetle. and we've
         | worked with them (nurturenature) to fix some bugs they've
         | found.
         | 
         | No formal proof at the moment either but it's something we're
         | thinking about.
        
           | matklad wrote:
           | Also worth mentioning our simulation testing setup: https://g
           | ithub.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle/blob/b642c04261....
           | 
           | Everything is fully deterministic, time is externalized, so
           | our simulation can run very fast and explore a lot of random
           | permutations of events (which is quite effective: https://www
           | .researchgate.net/publication/322133078_Why_is_ra...).
           | 
           | This isn't as thorough as model-checking or proving a
           | formalization of the algorithm, _but_ it has the benefit of
           | working with the real code. It is a bit less real than Jepsen
           | (as we essentially mock all syscalls), but is quite a bit
           | faster.
        
       | trollied wrote:
       | I've been looking through the docs, and I can't find how you're
       | intending on supporting the metadata that would go along with a
       | transaction. Say I want to post a journal, where would things
       | like department, customer/vendor (entity), cost centre etc exist?
       | Or header information? Or would they have to be linked
       | externally? Or is big ERP software not the target market? If not,
       | what is?
       | 
       | Just flipped back to the docs again, think I've found it: 'Set
       | user_data to a "foreign key" -- that is, an identifier of a
       | corresponding object within another database.' -- This is all
       | well and good, but if you're having to write to this other
       | database at the same time in order to store said other data,
       | doesn't it make your ledger a bit pointless? I'm just struggling
       | to see the use cases. Can anyone help me "get it" ? (For the
       | record, I work with ERP/accounting systems in my day job)
        
         | eatonphil wrote:
         | Great question. We've got a section in the FAQ on "How does
         | this fit into my architecture":
         | https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/FAQ#how-does-tigerbeetle-fit-
         | in....
         | 
         | tldr; we anticipate you'll have some database with all your
         | customer information. The metadata fields inside of TigerBeetle
         | currently can be used to link back to rows in your existing
         | database. Or if you don't need an external database and your
         | metadata fits into our metadata byte fields, you can use them
         | as you like.
        
           | trollied wrote:
           | Understood, thank you. How much space is available in the
           | metadata byte fields? I can't see the likes of banks or
           | financial institutions wanting to use it if they can't do
           | everything in a single atomic transaction, unless you have a
           | cunning 2 phase commit option/strategy with Oracle/DB2 etc.
           | 
           | Just want to say that I'm not trying to be negative - you're
           | a long way down the dev road, and must have thought about all
           | of this, so I want to read about it! :-)
        
             | eatonphil wrote:
             | This FAQ entry begins to describe the built-in two-phase
             | transfer feature we support:
             | https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/FAQ#what-is-two-phase-commit.
             | But we will have to brush up that answer with more details
             | and some recipes/sample code.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-30 23:00 UTC)