Comment by kelseydh
10 hours ago
We didn't observe any automatic batching when testing Tigerbeetle with their Go client. I think we initiated a new Go client for every new transaction when benchmarking, which is typically how one uses such a client in app code. This follows with our other complaint: it handles so little you will have to roll a lot of custom logic around it to batch realtime transactions quickly.
> We didn't observe any automatic batching when testing Tigerbeetle with their Go client.
This is not accurate. All TigerBeetle's clients also auto batch under the hood, which you can verify from the docs [0] and the source [1], provided your application has at least some concurrency.
> I think we initiated a new Go client for every new transaction when benchmarking
The docs are careful to warn that you shouldn't be throwing away your client like this after each request:
Again, I would double check that your architecture is not accidentally serializing everything. You should be running multiple gateways and they should each be able to handle concurrent user requests. The gold standard to aim for here is a stateless layer of API servers around TigerBeetle, and then you should be able to push pretty good load.
[0] https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/coding/requests/#automatic-batc...
[1] The core batching logic powering all language clients: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/cli...
Interesting, I thought I had heard that this is automatically done, but I guess it's only through concurrent tasks/threads. It is still necessary to batch in application code.
https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/coding/clients/go/#batching
But nonetheless, it seems weird to test it with singular queries, because Tigerbeetle's whole point is shoving 8,189 items into the DB as fast as possible. So if you populate that buffer with only one item your're throwing away all that space and efficiency.
We certainly are losing that efficiency, but this is typically how real-time transactions work. You write real-time endpoints to send off transactions as they come in. Needing to roll more than that is a major introduction of complexity.
We concluded where Tigerbeetle really shines is if you're a large entity like a central bank or corporation sending massive transaction files between entities. Tigerbeetle is amazing for moving large numbers of batch transactions at once.
We found other quirks with Tigerbeetle that made it difficult as a drop-in replacement for handling transactions in PostgreSQL. E.g. Tigerbeetle's primary ID key isn't UUIDv7 or ULID, it's a custom id they engineered for performance. The max metadata you can save on a transaction is a 128-bit unsigned integer on the user_data_128 field. While this lets them achieve lightning fast batch transaction processing benchmarks, the database allows for the saving of so little metadata you risk getting bottlenecked by all the attributes you'll need to wrap around the transaction in PostgreSQL to make it work in a real application.
> you risk getting bottlenecked by all the attributes you'll need to wrap around the transaction in PostgreSQL to make it work in a real application.
The performance killer is contention, not writing any associated KV data—KV stores scale well!
But you do need to preserve a clean separation of concerns in your architecture. Strings in your general-purpose DBMS as "system of reference" (control plane). Integers in your transaction processing DBMS as "system of record" (data plane).
Dominik Tornow wrote a great blog post on how to get this right (and let us know if our team can accelerate you on this!):
https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-11-06-the-write-last-read-...
I'm a bit worried you think instantiating a new client for every request is common practice. If you did that to Postgres or MySQL clients, you would also have degradation in performance.
PHP has created mysqli or PDO to deal with this specifically because of the known issues of it being expensive to recreate client connects per request
Ok your comment made me double check our benchmarking script in Go. Can confirm we didn't instantiate a new client with each request.
For transparency here's the full Golang benchmarking code and our results if you want to replicate it: https://gist.github.com/KelseyDH/c5cec31519f4420e195114dc9c8...
We shared the code with the Tigerbeetle team (who were very nice and responsive btw), and they didn't raise any issues with the script we wrote of their Tigerbeetle client. They did have many comments about the real-world performance of PostgreSQL in comparison, which is fair.