Tock Keeps High-Demand Restaurant Bookings Running with MariaDB

About Tock

Tock is an industry-leading reservation, table management, and payment processing platform and now part of the Resy Group, operating across 26 countries, Tock powers culinary experiences for fine dining establishments, wineries, and restaurant groups worldwide. By offering prepaid bookings, variable dynamic pricing, and time-slotted inventory management, Tock provides hospitality businesses with unprecedented control over their operations and guest relationships.

The Challenge

In the hospitality sector, database performance directly impacts business continuity and revenue generation. High-profile booking launches often unleash massive traffic bursts that crash conventional reservation systems. Furthermore, because Tock operates as a full payment processor handling prepaid tasting menus, deposits, and tickets, transactional accuracy is essential. Losing a booking or payment transaction leads to credit card discrepancies and operational failure.

To satisfy demanding service level agreements (SLAs) and maintain zero-data-loss integrity, Tock required a data infrastructure capable of:

• Handling Massive Concurrency Spikes: Supporting extreme traffic bursts during world-renowned restaurant booking openings without service disruption.
• Guaranteeing Absolute Transactional Consistency: Ensuring multi-datacenter consistency for financial payments and guest bookings.
• Enabling High Developer Velocity: Allowing a streamlined engineering team of 15 developers to rapidly push production updates and build new features without schema locking bottlenecks.
• Delivering Continuous High Availability: Maintaining 24/7 global uptime with robust multi-master redundancy.

Driving Efficiency Through an Agile, High-Availability Data Stack

Following a rigorous architectural review, Tock evaluated multiple databases, including MySQL 5.6 with custom patches, PostgreSQL, Apache HBase/BigTable, and Google Cloud Spanner. While Google Cloud Spanner proved cost-prohibitive, MariaDB was selected as Tock’s primary data store due to its open-source foundation, proven reliability, and cross-datacenter multi-master capabilities through Galera Cluster.

Tock deployed a multi-master architecture built entirely on MariaDB to:

• Deliver active multi-master replication, multi-datacenter write redundancy, and automatic node provisioning to guarantee zero data loss and uninterrupted availability.
• Empower developers to alter database schemas in production instantly, accelerating feature deployment cycles without locking operational tables.
• Complement an independent Kafka event-streaming pipeline to maintain 100% data integrity across millions of daily transaction logs and guest bookings.

The Impact

• Flawless Execution During Extreme Peak Launches: When Noma, widely recognized as one of the top restaurants in the world, prepared to launch a pop-up in Australia, every reservation app they had previously attempted crashed under traffic surges. Partnering with Tock, the engineering team optimized MariaDB performance to eliminate potential bottlenecks. On launch day, Tock handled 85,000 to 90,000 page views per minute and processed between 10,000 to 20,000 transactions per second seamlessly. Following this success, Noma migrated its entire global reservation book to Tock.
• Rapid Pivot to Launch “Tock To Go” in 72 Hours: During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, worldwide restaurant dining room closures caused industry revenue to drop by over 80%. Responding to an urgent customer request from Seattle’s Canlis restaurant, Tock designed, engineered, and shipped a comprehensive pickup and delivery platform—”Tock To Go”—in just 72 hours. Leveraging MariaDB’s flexible schema architecture and rapid deploy capabilities, Tock enabled thousands of restaurants to transition to takeout, control kitchen preparation pacing through time-slotted inventory, and rehire laid-off hospitality workers.
• Five Years of Continuous Zero Data Loss: Operating as both an e-commerce platform and operational database, Tock relies on MariaDB for immediate multi-datacenter data propagation. Over five years of continuous production operation, Tock’s audit verification pipeline has detected zero data loss across millions of financial transactions and bookings.