Better guidance for database developers

Posted Sep 25, 2019 13:25 UTC (Wed) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
In reply to: Better guidance for database developers by weberm
Parent article: Better guidance for database developers

Exactly. This is pretty much what happened on most consumer SSDs until quite recently: they would lie about flushing data, instead storing it in a volatile cache where it's re-ordered and lazily written out.

Abruptly lost power? Oh well. Hope you didn't need that data written consistently and in order.

But for marketing and benchmark results reasons, they'd report to the OS that they were doing write-through even when they were really write-back caching.

How's a database supposed to defend against that?

Is it supposed to protect your data from somebody pouring coffee into the host's disk array too?

Better guidance for database developers

Posted Sep 25, 2019 14:16 UTC (Wed) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

"Is it supposed to protect your data from somebody pouring coffee into the host's disk array too?"

Yes, for your sake, it better. I will pour my coffee into your database's disk array AGAIN if you keep leaving it in my bedroom, all 16 loud fans blowing full speed, ringere. I don't care how many nines you've promised, or how much fault tolerance you claim, or how "important" your data is. Hot chocolate, too, if you do it in the winter. So, step off or get burned. Make sure your transactions are atomic, check your backups, and get this monster OUT of here!

Worst roommate EVER, you are.

P.S. I agree with you. ;)