> WALs, and related low-level logging details, are critical for database systems that care deeply about durability on a single system. But the modern database isn’t like that: it doesn’t depend on commit-to-disk on a single system for its durability story. Commit-to-disk on a single system is both unnecessary (because we can replicate across storage on multiple systems) and inadequate (because we don’t want to lose writes even if a single system fails).
And then a bug crashes your database cluster all at once and now instead of missing seconds, you miss minutes, because some smartass thought "surely if I send request to 5 nodes some of that will land on disk in reasonably near future?".
I love how this industry invents best practices that are actually good then people just invent badly researched reasons to just... not do them.
And then a bug crashes your database cluster all at once and now instead of missing seconds, you miss minutes, because some smartass thought "surely if I send request to 5 nodes some of that will land on disk in reasonably near future?".
I love how this industry invents best practices that are actually good then people just invent badly researched reasons to just... not do them.