Filesystems and crash resistance

Use a dbms? And watch the dbms get corrupted when the power failure corrupts its writes.

There's nothing magic about a dbms, it's just another application. And it's just as prone to being corrupted as any other. One only has to look at the hoops Postgres has to jump through to TRY and ensure integrity.

I've always thought write barriers make sense. If I can guarantee that all writes before the barrier land before any ones after the barrier get written, I can reason about that and - more importantly - make sure that either (a) my logs are consistent, or (b) my data is consistent. More importantly, I can then recover my data successfully to pre- or post- write condition. I may not have a choice which, but at least the data is consistent.

Cheers,
Wol