Re: wikipedia down, slashdot covering, mysql mentioned

[Jochem van Dieten]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:22:55 +0200, Heikki Tuuri wrote:
> 
> a buggy fsync() in Linux is one of  the possible reasons here. If an InnoDB
> tablespace gets corrupt in a power outage, it is most probably caused by a
> bad fsync() implementation or configuration in the operating system or
> hardware. An fsync() call should write the data physically to disk or to a
> battery-backed, non-volatile disk cache. If it fails to do so, then any
> database, PostgreSQL or anything, can get corrupt.

Can they? Even if the absolute ordering of writes is maintained, only
full pages are written and each page has a checksum? It seems to me
that then you might lose transactions that have not yet committed to
disk, but your database would not get corrupt.

Jochem