A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability (via) Phil Eaton uses pseudo code to provide a clear description of how write-ahead logs in transactional database systems work, useful for understanding the tradeoffs they make and the guarantees they can provided.
I particularly liked the pseudo code explanation of group commits, where clients block waiting for their commit to be acknowledged as part of a batch of writes flushed to disk.
Recent articles
- I think "agent" may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now - 18th September 2025
- My review of Claude's new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name - 9th September 2025
- Recreating the Apollo AI adoption rate chart with GPT-5, Python and Pyodide - 9th September 2025