Re: mdb database protected against any power cut?

[Hallvard Breien Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no>]

Howard Chu writes:
> In the default mode (fully synchronous) you can only lose the in-progress
> transaction.

Oh duh, I forgot the sync filehandle.

> With dbnosync you can lose whatever hasn't been checkpointed yet.

I thought dbnosync could cause database corruption: Data and metadata
writes can get flushed out of order to the disk, leaving the meta page
temporarily pointing at garbage - at which time an OS crash or hardware
failure can make the inconsistency permanent.  Frequent checkpoints
merely reduce the chance such a crash has of catching the DB in an
inconsistent state.  (OTOH a mere slapd crash is no problem.)

> There is another mode (recently added, not yet exposed in back-mdb) that only
> flushes the data, not the metadata. With that mode, you might lose the
> in-progress transaction and the immediately preceding commit. This mode is
> slightly faster than fully-synchronous, and slightly slower than fully asynch.

That's like if we compiled with -DMDB_DSYNC=0?

-- 
Hallvard