The Write Last, Read First Rule
(tigerbeetle.com)63 points by vismit2000 7 hours ago
63 points by vismit2000 7 hours ago
I think they just reinvented 2-phase commit? I'm not sure either tbh.
Joran from TigerBeetle!
Happy to answer any questions. And thanks to Dominik Tornow of Resonate for writing this up as a guest post! It was a little rule we had coined, to help people remember how to preserve consistency across different DBMS's, and I think Dominik gave (beautiful) voice to it.
But it's not an AI generated image, it has the artist's signature in the bottom right corner. Tigerbeetle has a lot of custom artwork designed for their stuff that's high quality. I don't even see why you would think it was AI generated even without the artist signature, it's using the Tigerbeetle mascot and it looks drawn for the particular theme the blog is talking about.
Thanks, appreciate your kind words!
Yes, everything we do at TigerBeetle is handcrafted (by humans) for quality, including the art.
Joy Machs on our team is an artist, and as you spotted, he signs all his work—I always ask him to! :)
Joy also did much of the Zig artwork, which is how we met.
You can see more of his work here: https://sim.tigerbeetle.com (and see if you can find or "not find" an Easter egg in our docs).
from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
As a general rule when it comes to this pattern of replying to "this is AI generated" with that link: the people that write these posts often read HN and attach a certain amount of importance to the opinions presented here, and it's important that people express their opinions about trends in how the majority of technical writing submitted to this website is either generated or presented, before they become well and truly entrenched as being problems "too common to be interesting".
There's a difference between criticisms of the content or the reader's ability to view it and complaints about "tangential annoyances" surrounding it.
You would be missing out. Its a very well written blog post from a project that is solving a really important problem.
This post clearly shows how separating the system of record from the reference, with strict ordering, helps ensure consistency without transactions. The focus on idempotent operations and correct sequencing is practical and vital for reliable distributed systems. Using checkpointing to guarantee eventual correctness even during failures is a smart approach.
I found the article interesting, but I don't think I understand what is meant by 'Write Last, Read first' rule - even after reading it a few times. It seems to be too ambiguous a statement to be helpful.
Under the section 'Order of Operations':
> "Since the system of reference doesn’t determine existence, we can safely write to it first without committing anything. [...]"
Then the next paragraph
> "This principle—Write Last, Read First—ensures that we maintain application level consistency."
What I think it means is, 'writing-last to the system-of-record' and 'a read-first from the system of record' yields authoritative results, but I don't get that just from the title. Is my understanding correct?