PostgreSQL's fsync() surprise

Developers of database management systems are, by necessity, concerned about getting data safely to persistent storage. So when the PostgreSQL community found out that the way the kernel handles I/O errors could result in data being lost without any errors being reported to user space, a fair amount of unhappiness resulted. The problem, which is exacerbated by the way PostgreSQL performs buffered I/O, turns out not to be unique to Linux, and will not be easy to solve even there.

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