What if your application database could process financial transactions up to 1000x faster than a general purpose database? That’s the goal of TigerBeetle, a distributed financial accounting database designed for mission critical safety and performance.

In this talk we'll discover TigerBeetle and its data model, and see how you can use it in your Elixir applications with TigerBeetlex, an Elixir client built upon its official Zig client. After exploring the library’s API, we’ll dive into its internals. We'll learn the details of how binaries are implemented in the BEAM VM, understand NIF resources, and discover how TigerBeetle’s non-blocking API pairs perfectly with Elixir’s message-passing.We will also cover some of the tradeoffs in the design of the library (e.g. macros vs code generation, efficient mutability vs familiar immutability) and why these decisions matter for developers aiming to build idiomatic Elixir libraries.

About the speaker
Riccardo Binetti started his career as an embedded developer, but switched to backend development as soon as he discovered (and fell in love with) Elixir. He has been using Elixir as his primary language since 2017 and he is an active contributor to various open-source projects.