Sometimes it's just amazing to look at how much dedication someone put into a list like this, and wonder what they do with this information. It's inspiring (to me at least.)
In a park near my hotel, there's an elderly gentleman who uses a giant brush to paint calligraphy on concrete walkways every morning. He paints it with water - so it gradually evaporates over the course of the next hour or so. I admire his work in the same way I admire this web page.
There are rumors that there were 2 pilots aboard, and that one of them accidentally triggered autoland, and they couldn't figure out how to turn it off:
> I have also seen this used in other formats quite successfully - Fandom/Wikia (used to?) use a MySQL database for each sub-site.
Stack Overflow used it as well, with a database per site (DBA.StackExchange.com, ServerFault, SuperUser, Ask Ubuntu, etc.)
I have a bunch of clients using it. Another drawback with this design is high availability and disaster recovery can become more complex if you have to account for an ever-growing number of databases.
> If you are on AWS and AWS goes down, that's covered in the news as a bunch of billion dollar companies were also down. Customer probably gives you a pass.
Exactly - I've had clients say, "We'll pay for hot standbys in the same region, but not in another region. If an entire AWS region goes down, it'll be in the news, and our customers will understand, because we won't be their only service provider that goes down, and our clients might even be down themselves."
My guess is their infrastructure is set up through clickops, making it extra painful to redeploy in another region. Even if everything is set up through CloudFormation, there's probably umpteen consumers of APIs that have their region hardwired in. By the time you get that all sorted, the region is likely to be back up.
You can take advantage by having an unplanned service window every time a large cloud provider goes down. Then tell your client that you where the reason why AWS went down.
Yes, this is by design. SQL is a great general purpose query language for read-heavy variable-length string workloads, but TigerBeetle optimizes for write-heavy transaction processing workloads (essentially debit/credit with fixed-size integers) and specifically with power law contention, which kills SQL row locks.
I spoke about this specific design decision in depth at Systems Distributed this year:
Depending on contention and RTT, as a specialized OLTP DBMS, TB can do roughly 1000-2000x more performance than a single node OLGP DBMS (cf. the live demo in the talk above)… but also with strict serializability. You don’t need to sacrifice correctness or real-time resolution, and that’s important. For example, if you need to do real-time balance checks.
Node count doesn't matter. You could use an embedded database and encounter the same problem. There is some time T between when you acquire a lock and release it. Depending on the amount of contention in your system, this will have some affect on total throughput (i.e. Amdahl's law).
Almost all commercial MVCC implementations (including Postgres) use row locks. Very few use OCC even though it's arguably a more natural fit for MVCC. Pessimistic locking is simply more robust over varied workloads.
TB seems really awesome, but is there non-DebitCredit use cases where it can be applied effectively? I like trying to find off-label uses for cool technology
Compared to Redis, TigerBeetle has strong durability, and an LSM storage engine to page incremental updates to disk, so it can support 10+ TiB data sets without running into snapshot stalls or OOM.
It helps to know what kind of data TigerBeetle handles. The data committed by its transactions is an immutable Transfer of id:128-bit, debit_account_id:128-bit, credit_account_id:128-bit, amount:128-bit, ledger:128-bit, code:16-bit, flags:bitfield, timestamp:64-bit, user_data_128, user_data_64, user_data_32.
Transactions atomically process one or more Transfers, keeping Account balances correct. Accounts are also records, their core fields (debits_posted, credits_posted, etc).
This gives a good idea of what TigerBeetle might be good for and what it might not be. For anything where latency/throughput and accuracy really, really matters, it could be worth the effort to make your problem fit.
> what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them.
That's true in two ways: not only are less companies paying to send their attendees to training, but less companies are paying to sponsor these events as well.
Even at AI research conferences the trend seems to be such (also fewer industry exhibits), though I'm not perfectly up to date on this, might have turned around very recently. The reason seems to be that they are not hiring as much right now.
I think this is a shorter-term trend in the economy though, it doesn't necessarily hold as much inertia as other factors. Unless the AI job replacement really works out the way many companies hope.
> I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID.
Large SQLSaturday events used to regularly get 300-400 attendees, and a good 10-20% of them were new to the field. I would regularly do a show-of-hands in my session asking how many of them were attending a SQL Saturday for the first time, and it wasn't unusual to see half the hands go up.
You're right - Twitter used to generate FOMO amongst those not attending, plus make it easier for attendees to coordinate after-hours events. Both of those factors are diminished.
Twitter used to be a huge conference backchannel. But, as far as I can tell, that's largely gone and neither Mastodon nor Bluesky have really recreated the Twitter of old. I have accounts on all three and I barely look at them and many others I know are the same.
Sometimes it's just amazing to look at how much dedication someone put into a list like this, and wonder what they do with this information. It's inspiring (to me at least.)
In a park near my hotel, there's an elderly gentleman who uses a giant brush to paint calligraphy on concrete walkways every morning. He paints it with water - so it gradually evaporates over the course of the next hour or so. I admire his work in the same way I admire this web page.