It looks cool but is confusing as it's impossible for me to actually "win".
Is there any chance you could add a mode with a regular database so I can get the enjoyment of learning how to break it? I can't appreciate how hard it is to crash TigerBeetle since I don't have a frame of reference.
More in-game explanations on what's happening would be useful as well.
This would be awesome to do.
We're running real TigerBeetle code in each of the "beetles" that you see. While we couldn't bring in real code from a regular database (most were not designed for Deterministic Simulation Testing), we could definitely make TigerBeetle emulate one.
For example, we could disable TB's corruption detection/recovery code paths that provide storage fault-tolerance. And then you could zap "a regular database" with a cosmic ray and see what happens with a regular consensus protocol like Raft that doesn't implement UW-Madison's “Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage”, how the fault propagates through the cluster.
> More in-game explanations on what's happening would be useful as well.
Yes, for sure. What would you like us specifically to explain more concretely?
> It looks cool but is confusing as it's impossible for me to actually "win".
(There is "a game within a game" that you can play after Radioactive that you can indeed win! Also an OLAP easter egg in there somewhere if you can find it!)
This would be amazing! I'd suggest that TigerBeetle should be hard mode. I can understand common failures by breaking database clusters with them, then get crushed when TigerBeetle defeats the strategy I just learned. Could be useful for the non-technical people you want to sell to.
> Yes, for sure. What would you like us specifically to explain more concretely?
More or less the explanation you gave above. In Scenario 3, I see you're zapping random beetles causing the network to automatically recover. Perhaps the sim should freeze right before the first zap, and step through the following events with annotations:
1. You're about to corrupt the storage
2. TigerBeetle will detect the data corruption
3. It won't propagate through the cluster
This would let me see what animations correspond to what events, so when it gets faster, I still understand what's going on.
There's also a lot of metrics on the screen. The simulator should highlight important metrics for the scenario I'm watching, like read/write corruption rate in Scenario 3.
Also, it'd be cool to see metrics that evaluate the system. e.g. How long does a user have to wait before they get a response? Does TigerBeetle degrade better under load than competitors?
Right now, it's hard for me to judge the performance of TigerBeetle in your scenarios beyond "it works!", even though your blog post claims large gains in speed.
Those metrics would also be an entertaining way of keeping score (maybe add a leaderboard?) Making it extremely difficult (but still possible) to score against TigerBeetle gives me an intuitive knowledge of why your database is so good.
> (There is "a game within a game" that you can play after Radioactive that you can indeed win! Also an OLAP easter egg in there somewhere if you can find it!)
Thanks for the tip! I'm playing it now.