@balagrivine

The WAL Hole Problem

6d ago · 8 min read · TL;DR Too Short;Just Read If a WAL write is interrupted by a Unix signal, or completes as a short write, the kernel may leave a zero-filled gap at the reserved offset. During crash recovery, TidesDB'

When should you fsync directories?

Apr 11 · 4 min read · My previous article talked about promises of disk durability, and the fact that you could still lose data even after fsync()-ing a file. This will be a short blog that builds over the previous one, bu

Was your data actually written to disk?

Apr 5 · 7 min read · When we think of data durability, one thing comes to mind. That data has been safely stored such that an adverse occurrence like power outage or system crash doesn't lead to data loss. In this article

Understanding Limited Direct Execution in Operating Systems

Jan 31 · 6 min read · I recently picked up this timeless book, Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, a book covering the fundamentals of operating systems. My motivation to read this book comes from partly working on a critical software, a fast embeddable key-value storag...

Implementing Domain-Driven Design in Storage Engine Development

Jan 17 · 6 min read · A few weeks ago, I began contributing to TidesDB, an open-source, embeddable key-value storage engine written in C. Coming from an application engineering background, I noticed that many of the design principles I had relied on in large-scale backend...