Developing Applications on TigerBeetle

TigerBeetle is a domain-specific, Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database. It has a fixed schema consisting of Accounts and Transfers. In return for this prescriptive design, it provides excellent performance, integrated business logic, and powerful invariants.

To help you get started building on TigerBeetle, here is a quick overview of the most important concepts:

Data Model Overview

• Accounts track balances for users or other entities.
• Transfers move funds between Accounts.
• Account balances and transfer amounts are represented as debits and credits. Double-entry bookkeeping ensures your accounting maintains consistency.
• Accounts are partitioned into Ledgers, which may represent different currencies, assets, liabilities, etc. or they may be used to support multitenancy. Only accounts on the same ledger can transact directly, but you can use atomically linked transfers to implement cross-currency transactions.
• TigerBeetle has first-class support for two-phase transfers, which can hold funds in a pending state and can be used to synchronize transfers with external systems.

TigerBeetle in Your System Architecture

TigerBeetle is an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database built for safety and performance.

It is not a general purpose database like PostgreSQL or MySQL. Instead, TigerBeetle works alongside your general purpose database and should be used to handle the hot path of transaction processing.

Many fields on the Account and Transfer data structures are stored in TigerBeetle as simple numbers. You may want to include metadata about ledgers, account and transfer types, etc in your general purpose database or directly in your application code.

For more information relevant to integrating TigerBeetle into your system, take a look at the following pages:

• Client Requests
• Client Sessions
• Consistency
• Time

Advanced Recipes

Depending on your use case, you may find these additional design patterns helpful:

• Currency Exchange
• Multi-Debit, Multi-Credit Transfers
• Closing Accounts

Want Help Developing on TigerBeetle?

Ask the Community

Have questions about TigerBeetle's data model, how to design your application on top of it, or anything else?

Come join our Community Slack and ask any and all questions you might have!

Dedicated Consultation

Would you like the TigerBeetle team to help you design your chart of accounts and leverage the power of TigerBeetle in your architecture?

Let us help you get it right. Contact our CEO, Joran Dirk Greef, at joran@tigerbeetle.com to set up a call.