Paul Vinkenoog wrote:

> That only protects you against power losses. But with forced writes
> off, your mutations 'hang' in memory until the OS decides that it's
> time to write them to disk. It may be seconds, minutes or more -
> you simply don't know. For as long as the changes have not been
> written to disk, the situation is 'unsafe'. Power losses and abnormal
> shutdowns are rather dramatic examples, but other things can go wrong
> too - with the buffer, with the scheduler - and cause failures, in
> the worst case without you even noticing it.

Many moons ago when I was using Interbase on one of my council sites we had
problems with a machine loosing data every day. It worked fine all day, and they
ran off the daily stats, but the next day ... all gone. It took two weeks to
discover the cleaner was pulling out a RED plug marked DO NOT REMOVE to plug in
her vacuum simply because she could not be bothered to go to another socket at
ground level! Nothing was being written to the hard disk until the application
was closed DESPITE having forced write ON, but that was back in Windows98 days ...

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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