October Edition: Postgres and TigerBeetle

We're excited to be back with another evening of Database Internals! Expect great talks, pizza 🍕 and plenty of time to chat.

📍 CHECK24, Erika-Mann-Straße 62-66
📅 Tuesday, October 27, doors open at 18:30

Databricks: PostgreSQL as an Open Data Format: 100x Faster TPC-H Queries Through Direct Storage Reads
PostgreSQL has never been known as an analytical system. Earlier efforts forked it to add columnar storage, MPP, and vectorized execution, drifting away from core PostgreSQL and breaking compatibility with its tooling. More recent extensions federate to engines like DuckDB, but still hit the limits of an executor designed for OLTP.
This talk flips the model: rather than going through the PostgreSQL execution layer, read the data directly from storage. Borrowing from lakehouse architectures (open file formats like Parquet, table formats like Iceberg, governance through a catalog), Hristo Stoyanov, Member of the Technical Staff at Databricks, introduces the "lakebase": separating storage and compute for operational databases so that multiple engines can perform serverless reads of PostgreSQL's own file format. We'll start with the state of analytics on PostgreSQL today, review how lakehouse engines use open formats and catalogs to stay fast while respecting transactional and access control guarantees, then dig into the internals of a new open source project that reads PostgreSQL data files outside the PostgreSQL process. The talk closes with a demo showing up to 100x faster TPC-H on PostgreSQL data, with no impact on the running instances.
Hristo Stoyanov works on the Lakebase team at Databricks. Previously Google Spanner, SingleStore and Stripe.

TigerBeetle: How to Build Mission-Critical Systems
How do you build a production-ready distributed database in just three and a half years?

A big part of the answer is testing. Not just to find bugs, but to make development faster. Bugs in distributed systems often depend on rare combinations of timing and failures. Reproducing them can take hours or even days, creating long feedback loops that slow development. In this talk, we will show how we combine deterministic simulation testing and swarm testing to explore complex failure scenarios, reproduce bugs deterministically in seconds, and thus shorten feedback loops. We will share practical lessons from building TigerBeetle, and explain how our testing approach can help you build reliable systems faster.

Tobias Ziegler is a Software Engineer at TigerBeetle, with a Ph.D. from TU Darmstadt and a postdoc at TU Munich.

Agenda
18:30 Doors open
18:40 Welcome
18:45 - 19:10 Talk + Q&A (CHECK24)
19:10 - 19:55 Talk + Q&A (TigerBeetle)
19:55 - 20:15 Pizza break 🍕
20:15 - 21:00 Talk + Q&A (Databricks)
21:00 Wrap-up & networking