I've been looking through the docs, and I can't find how you're intending on supporting the metadata that would go along with a transaction. Say I want to post a journal, where would things like department, customer/vendor (entity), cost centre etc exist? Or header information? Or would they have to be linked externally? Or is big ERP software not the target market? If not, what is?
Just flipped back to the docs again, think I've found it: 'Set user_data to a "foreign key" — that is, an identifier of a corresponding object within another database.' -- This is all well and good, but if you're having to write to this other database at the same time in order to store said other data, doesn't it make your ledger a bit pointless? I'm just struggling to see the use cases. Can anyone help me "get it" ? (For the record, I work with ERP/accounting systems in my day job)
tldr; we anticipate you'll have some database with all your customer information. The metadata fields inside of TigerBeetle currently can be used to link back to rows in your existing database. Or if you don't need an external database and your metadata fits into our metadata byte fields, you can use them as you like.
Understood, thank you. How much space is available in the metadata byte fields? I can't see the likes of banks or financial institutions wanting to use it if they can't do everything in a single atomic transaction, unless you have a cunning 2 phase commit option/strategy with Oracle/DB2 etc.
Just want to say that I'm not trying to be negative - you're a long way down the dev road, and must have thought about all of this, so I want to read about it! :-)
This FAQ entry begins to describe the built-in two-phase transfer feature we support: https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/FAQ#what-is-two-phase-commit. But we will have to brush up that answer with more details and some recipes/sample code.
Comments
I've been looking through the docs, and I can't find how you're intending on supporting the metadata that would go along with a transaction. Say I want to post a journal, where would things like department, customer/vendor (entity), cost centre etc exist? Or header information? Or would they have to be linked externally? Or is big ERP software not the target market? If not, what is?
Just flipped back to the docs again, think I've found it: 'Set user_data to a "foreign key" — that is, an identifier of a corresponding object within another database.' -- This is all well and good, but if you're having to write to this other database at the same time in order to store said other data, doesn't it make your ledger a bit pointless? I'm just struggling to see the use cases. Can anyone help me "get it" ? (For the record, I work with ERP/accounting systems in my day job)
Great question. We've got a section in the FAQ on "How does this fit into my architecture": https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/FAQ#how-does-tigerbeetle-fit-in....
tldr; we anticipate you'll have some database with all your customer information. The metadata fields inside of TigerBeetle currently can be used to link back to rows in your existing database. Or if you don't need an external database and your metadata fits into our metadata byte fields, you can use them as you like.
Understood, thank you. How much space is available in the metadata byte fields? I can't see the likes of banks or financial institutions wanting to use it if they can't do everything in a single atomic transaction, unless you have a cunning 2 phase commit option/strategy with Oracle/DB2 etc.
Just want to say that I'm not trying to be negative - you're a long way down the dev road, and must have thought about all of this, so I want to read about it! :-)
This FAQ entry begins to describe the built-in two-phase transfer feature we support: https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/FAQ#what-is-two-phase-commit. But we will have to brush up that answer with more details and some recipes/sample code.