Comment by stingraycharles
5 hours ago
Yeah this should be benchmarked against other systems that have flush() disabled.
mmap is nice but it doesn’t support durable semantics in the way that we usually mean with databases.
if a write is acknowledged it should not be forgotten, which is not what this is.
You're right, that mode provides process crash recovery, not power-loss durability. The benchmark compares it against fjall’s equivalent buffered-WAL mode.
Word choice matters. Defaults matter. People will go "well it says durable right here" and while arguably, yes, they should RTFM, it would still be great if tool-builders did not set the shotgun's default state to State::AT_FOOT. It would be nice if every paragraph of technical writing that I have to do need not be burdened by a thousand asterisks of "durable in this context means something other than durable".
>arguably, yes, they should RTFM
Agreed. Good design is when the things do what you expect them to do without reading the manual, don't reuse wording with other meaning in the wrong way. That way if you do encounter nee wording, you know you should read the manual.
If that's your design constraint, couldn't you speed it up by getting rid of the WAL?
You'd lose durability against process crashes.
If your system has a reasonable tolerance for power failure (multi-az multi-cloud), this can provide much better throughput
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