Nando,

> S> Forced Writes, though, are REQUIRED in order to **absolutely

protect**

> S> against database corruption.
>
> well, as long as the other levels of write caching can be disabled.

Very true!

Fortunately, for most OS write caching is disabled by default.

And the same is true for HD caches, the cache is for reads.

> S> Without Forced Writes, corruptions can and will easily occur on

Windows

> S> in the event of a server shutdown/restart while the database is

active,

> S> and occasionally on Linux (the OS is better in this regard).
>
> Don't forget the MaxUnflushedWrites and MaxUnflushedWriteTime
> parameters, which allow you to decide how much data you can afford to
> lose in case of crash.

I don't believe that is the correct way to look at it.

The settings control the **window** in which a non-forced write db will
be in danger of being corrupted.

Unless the MaxUnflushedWrites is set to 1, any other value will create a
situation where some disk writes could be unflushed, and therefore the
"on metal" database is potentially corrupt -- due to some pages writes
being potentially written out of order by the OS disk/cache management.

Personally, I will never allow a production database to be deployed with

Forced Writes = OFF -- I want to sleep at night.


Sean